We writers are a strange and contradictory breed.
Take the act of writing itself. When we’re not writing regularly, we can be sullen, morose, unhappy creatures.
And yet, when we are writing… my husband would say “how can you tell the difference?”
The actual act of writing can be exalting, even thrilling, as the strength of our ideas and our connection with our characters carries us forward like an unrelenting wave. But even then, we surf at our own peril. Because every wave eventually crashes.
More often than not, writing is a long, boring grind. My writer brain has to juggle a ton of variables as I write. It has to simultaneously hold onto the details of the plot (past, present and future), immerse itself in the minutiae of the characters – who are they? what are their histories? what were they feeling in the last scene and why? – and it has to do all of this while providing a realistic and compelling backdrop against which the whole story is set. But not with too much detail – or too little!
Sure, most of pacing, character and info dumping issues will get fixed in the next draft. But my point is that writing itself can be a grueling exercise, and my little writer brain often tries to find ways to put it off or squirm out of it.
The thing I’ve found most helpful in keeping it happy is to plan ahead for regular distractions and rewards.
My go-to for this has always been chocolate. I’d break off a square of chocolate and then split it into a bunch of tiny pieces, rewarding myself with one for each page of writing (or each edited scene) I completed. This didn’t always work, of course – sometimes I’d finish the first page and look down to discover that all the chocolate was gone.
I’d blame my husband Mark, except for that lingering dark chocolate taste on my tongue.
But it was a good reward system. At least until I started writing late at night, when ingesting a bunch of caffeine-infused chocolate became a detriment to getting to sleep when my head finally did hit the pillow.
My next attempt at brain distraction was a video game. There are a bunch of versions of this one out there – basically, there’s a pile of objects on the screen, and your job is to match them in threes to remove them from the board. My brain loves to organize things, and this one has become an addiction.
It’s the same idea as the chocolate – for every page I complete, my writer brain gets a break and can play a round of the game.
This seemed to work well, until the whole enterprise ran aground on the same shore as my chocolate treats had – my fired-up brain refused to shut down when it came time to go to bed, instead preferring to spend hours on end imagining itself matching objects in three.
If you too have a writer brain, I offer you my sincerest condolences.
So now I’m onto a new strategy. Last night I printed out a crossword puzzle. And for each page I completed, I turned to this (non-blue-screen) piece of paper and guessed at a few of the clues. By the end of my writing session, I’d logged 2,200 words and finished half of the puzzle.
And then I slept like a baby, right?
Of course I didn’t. I’m the proud owner of a writer brain, remember? There’s always something new and exciting to chase down instead of, you know, actually getting some rest.
But I did sleep better than the night before, and it wasn’t the missing crossword spaces that kept me awake, so I am prepared to declare victory.
And maybe, just maybe I will sleep even better tonight after I finish the damned thing.
To my fellow writers – what do you do to reward/distract your writer brain while writing?