I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
Since completing a developmental read-through of my book manuscript and then suffering a bad ski accident, I’ve lost momentum in my book writing. I’m still blogging here most days but I haven’t even looked at the manuscript for over two weeks.
That changes today. I asked Chat for an idea of how to re-enter my writing and it suggested a “12-minute stolen writing session.”
Here’s the idea:
Set a timer for 12 minutes (not 15; 12 feels sneakier).
Then write in secret, as if:
- no one will ever see it
- you’re hiding in the corner of your own life
- you’re jotting a note to Future You
Write about anything related to the book:
- a line you want to add
- a memory you suddenly recall
- a metaphor you like
- a sentence revision
- a moment that needs expanding
Twelve stolen minutes.
No pressure.
No “chapter.”
No structure.This is the single best way to bypass resistance.
I’m going to go do it now… back in 12!
Ok, I did it. I free wrote an epilogue, using the ski accident as the hook for a description of recklessly falling in love, as I have done with Ray. In it, I recommend recklessness in dating and not as much recklessness as I have practiced in skiing.
I don’t know if I’ll keep it, but at least I looked at the manuscript again. I also reviewed the first couple sections of a new chapter I’ve been working on “Celebration over Settling.” In dating, many people say, reckfully, “I don’t want to settle.” What they typically mean by this is “I don’t want to get less than I deserve in the great exchange that is dating.” It’s based on an idea of people having different values as potential mates. Someone who is conventionally very attractive, has lots of money and education, is suitably sociable, lives in a nice place, and so forth has a lot of exchange value. They shouldn’t “settle” for less than they are worth. Everyone wants to land someone at least as desirable as they are themselves, and the idea that they might be settling encodes the idea that they are somehow better, more desirable than their current partner in the dating market.
But people aren’t measurable or placeable along one dimension of dating desirability. Each person is a unique package of many features and characteristics and possibilities. And the person with whom you are actually compatible in all the important ways may not be someone who, from the outside, looks like a paragon of dating desirability.
In the chapter I’m working on, I recommend that daters leave the logic of settling behind. Instead, celebrate finding someone with whom they have emotional and physical attraction along with some level of lifestyle compatibility. That, in itself, is so unlikely that it’s worth feeling a sense of awe and gratitude about it.
I suppose that’s the crux of what I’m saying in the book: it’s really hard to find someone with whom you share mutual attraction (of many kinds… emotional, social, lifestyle, physical) and yet everyone starts by thinking about other features of a person: their age, their education level, their height or weight, their money, their fashion sense, and so forth.
I felt that was a successful way to break through resistance though I’d question Chat’s statement This is the single best way to bypass resistance. There are probably other ways too. Still, I liked it, and I might do 12-minute sessions over the next few days while I’m traveling to North Carolina and doing a road trip with my friend back to Colorado.
It feels good to work on the book again!