Writing is hard. I wrote the entire first draft of my current graphic novel project in 1 hour daily blocks of writing. That's about 111 pages of writing done at a pace of about 1 page a day. Writing for an hour only to get 1 page out of it is excruciating. The writing blocks were brutal and got incrementally more difficult as I got further towards the end of the hour. As I've continued to work on this project I've realized that the 1 hour blocks weren't working. I was having an increasingly harder time even sitting down to write, let alone completing the hour. It was starting to become a massive chore and I was regretting even having taken on this project. My consistency was totally shot. Then a few days ago I was looking at videos of how to learn computer programming (switching careers is an escape tactic I am particularly prone to when whatever I'm doing gets tough), and the guy in the video talked about the importance of showing up, and of making things easy for yourself. He recommended an easy minimum target of just 20 minutes a day for learning how to program. This would keep you thinking about programming daily and there was a good chance you'd often go beyond the 20 minutes once you got into it. The idea was to build in daily consistency, keep your mind thinking about coding and ultimately get you to code for much longer blocks of time. It made so much sense that I thought it could be applied to writing as well. I've written before about how useful it is to simply get started with projects and holding on for a few minutes because motivation does come with time from the act of doing. There is also a weird peculiarity about writing that makes it different from other types of work. For something like math oftentimes brute forcing a problem with time can help you solve it. But for writing, many ideas don't come from effort, they come to you in the periods when you are not writing and the subconscious processes of your brain continue to work on the problem that you are consciously taking a break from. You could write one day and then get stuck, wait a while as the ideas percolate in your head and then have the next section of the project come to you in the shower, which you then add to your project in your next writing session. Often, in my case, I only have about 20 minutes worth of ideas in my head before writing becomes a huge chore again. So a 20 minute time limit makes a lot of sense. It's a small commitment, that I don't have any excuse not to stick to every day, and I can even do multiple 20 minute blocks throughout the day to capture ideas that come to me at unexpected times through the day. My productivity has become better with these small blocks than with the 1 hour blocks I was using before so I highly recommend trying this tactic if you are getting stuck with your writing. Easy commitments that you can keep doing consistently on a daily basis are a powerful combination. It helps to form habits, it's a lot lower stress and it can result in better productivity. I also recommend trying it with your drawing, it's a great way to never miss a day of drawing practice. We all have 20 minutes a day to spend on things we'd want to do and I'm a big believer in trying to make difficult things as easy as possible. Note: I'll try to find the video that got me this insight if I can and add it to the post. It's a great video to watch if you are interested in learning coding.
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