A NaNoCRATE

#16 • 4 TIPS TO OVERCOME DAILY PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

Struggling to get started with your daily writing? Jodi Compton has some easy tips to help blast you right into your story!

A daily writing session is a lot like going to a pool to swim laps. (Bear with me on this). Presumably, you want to swim your laps or you wouldn't have come; you'd be disappointed if you got to the pool to find it closed.

Yet when the time comes, there you stand at the edge, making excuses not to get in. Not just yet.

Many of us have this same push-pull feeling about our writing. Why? Not just because it's work, I think–most of us get up and go to school or work every day, or tackle minor projects like laundry with a matter-of-fact attitude.

Writing, if anything, should be something we're happy to begin. The very fact that you're reading this, after all, indicates that writing excites you.

But that, in itself, might be the root of the problem. An uninspired day at work or school is no big deal; it happens all the time. But we bring real emotional freight to the blank page. Writing should be enjoyable, but what if it isn't?

What if we don't find what Stephen King calls "the hole in the page" and fall into it? What does that say about us? Does it mean this project–or our writing in general–isn't meant to be?

This is classic performance anxiety, and performance anxiety spurs us to find something, anything, to do other than writing. Fourteen years after I published my first novel, I still wrestle with these feelings. In those years, though, I've learned some tricks to get past them.

1. Re-read yesterday's work.

At first, this is just reading. Then I find a place where I obviously omitted a word: "He hefted the out of the trunk" should be "He hefted the groceries out of the trunk," so I fix that. Then I start making other light corrections. So now I'm not just reading, but editing, a shift from passive to active. Then, when I come to the end of yesterday's material, it seems very natural to just start writing. Hey presto! I've eased myself into my daily session without taking a jarring plunge. And something which makes that even easier is...

2. Stop in the middle of a hot streak.

Are two characters in a heated argument? Has a pickup truck rolled over and trapped your MC, and bystanders are trying to lift it off her?

Stop right there!

Of course, that's counterintuitive. It seems much more natural to say, "I'll just finish this scene and then knock off for the night." But the next day, you'll have to start with a new passage, and no matter how well you've synopsized (if you're a planner), this is harder than picking up the thread of a scene in progress.

Neither of these things work, though, if you have difficulty sitting down at your desk in the first place. If that's the issue ...

3. Tell yourself you only have to do 30 minutes.

Newton's First Law (objects in motion stay in motion, objects at rest stay at rest) is surprisingly applicable to human effort. Despite how reluctant we are to come to a task in the first place, entropy sets in once we've begun, and it takes a bit of psychological effort to stop.

For example, imagine you're writing the previously-mentioned "heated argument" scene. Wouldn't it take a bit of discipline to stop without finishing it? Usually, it's only initial resistance that needs to be overcome.

So tell yourself, "I only have to do 30 minutes, and then if I'm still not feeling it, I can stop and do something else." More often that not, you'll do 60 or 90 minutes... maybe your whole 1667 words.

4. Bonus tip for apartment/condo dwellers:

If you live in a building with the classic big-bank-of-mailboxes on the ground floor, unplug your modem or router, take it downstairs, and LOCK IT IN YOUR MAILBOX.

As Adrian Monk would say, you'll thank me later.