Greetings, writers—
I’ve written before about my long, slow jogs, but I failed to mention an embarrassing truth about them, which is that sometimes the soundtrack to these sustained but low-level efforts is a self-improvement audiobook. Have I played Sharon Salzburg’s 28-day meditation program and tried to “meditate” while jogging? Yes, absolutely; I even closed my eyes while running. Did I hark to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, played at 1.5x speed1, and imagine a life in which I might spend less time at my computer?2 Of course I did.
The larger question is if I ever truly improve myself by listening to these things, and the answer to that is no. Instead, I like to learn about all the methods I might employ to become a better person and then actively not do them. This way I live in an eternal state of hope and possibility. Tomorrow I will achieve more! Tomorrow I will discover the true strength of my powers! Etc. etc.
Why is this fun for me (because it is so very fun)? Who knows. If I had a therapist, maybe she could explain it.
Yesterday on my long, slow jog, before I sent it into the Willamette (though not as dramatically as this guy did), I was listening to an episode of Hidden Brain, in which Shankar Vedantam talks to Adam Alter about what to do when you’re feeling stuck. The show’s ostensible hook was why George R.R. Martin, “the man suffering the most public case of writer’s block in the history of contemporary literature,” can’t seem to finish the next book in his Song of Fire and Ice series.3
I’d been thinking about the pace of writing projects: how they start quickly, then slow down precipitously (let’s not call it a long, terrible slog, even though it is) and then, when you’re nearing the end, the pace picks up again. Having just reached the end of my most recent Patterson collaboration, I’d been struck (again, though I seem to forget it every time), how the proverbial wind was at my back in those final chapters. How it seemed like the universe was handing me everything I needed to finish the story.
Well, as Adam Alter will tell you, this fast-slow-fast pattern is found all over, from the behavior of mice in mazes to people paying off their credit card debt. He’s got a cute little metaphor for it, which I’ve done my best to accurately transcribe.
Imagine you’re sailing from New York to, say, Southampton in Britain. When you leave, you have a number of landmarks behind you, and there’s a lot of activity at the beginning of the journey... You can see how fast you’re moving.
When you get into the middle part of the journey, all you see is ocean. You don’t have any external cues to tell you how fast you’re moving, and so that middle period is a long period between leaving the land behind and then waiting for the next land to come into view. In contrast to the beginning of the experience, you don’t have a lot of feedback about your progress, and that’s demotivating, even if you’re moving quite rapidly.
And then of course as you approach the British Isles, you can start to see how fast you’re moving. You’re getting some external cues that are reinforcing—that say, “keep going.”
“All you see is ocean.” I am so familiar with this feeling.
Alter suggests breaking down the journey, whatever it may look like, into smaller chunks so that you’re able to see progress along the way. This longitude in the ocean; that chapter number in the book; that next 100 words.
And since I’ve talked about the importance of low expectations before (here, too), let me add that Alter backs me up on that. Keep the bar so low it’s practically on the floor, he says. Can’t write? Set a timer for one single, stupid minute.
Speaking of small chunks and modest expectations, it’s time for your Friday writing prompt. Remember, all it wants you to do is write one short thing. You can do it in 10 minutes. Or 20 minutes, or an hour if you’ve got it. And then you’ve done something that you’ve been telling yourself you want to do.
Today’s prompt comes from Isabel Allende. Tackle it however you like: a scene, poem, a letter, a scrap of a memoir…
“Write what should not be forgotten.”
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I listen to all books and podcasts at 1.5x 😬
From Burkeman’s newsletter: “Just by making [writing] a smaller part of your day, you’ll find yourself looking forward to it more. It shifts from being something you have to do, for hour after hour, to something you get to do. This chimes with the research of the psychologist Robert Boice (quoted in Four Thousand Weeks) who found that the most productive writers were those who made writing only a modest part of their schedules, rather than letting it dominate. Motivated to return to it day after day, they produced more output over the long haul.”