The Surprising Benefits of Just Showing Up

I'm trying something new this year. Aptly enough, I started it as a New Years Resolution. I resolved to, among working out and practicing music, write every day. I had hoped that it would help me actually make progress on the stories I've had languishing unpublished in my folders for years now, and it has. What I didn't anticipate is how effective it would be for fighting through writer's block.

Now, according to several pieces of advice I decided to take the 'Showing Up' approach to my resolution. IE: Resolving to do something so small that you can't tell yourself you don't have time to do it. For music it's to play one song. For workouts it's to do five push-ups and sit-ups. For writing it's to write a single sentence in a story. Any story. Every. Single. Day. Everything together takes less than ten minutes.

I thought: If I can get myself to do a little bit every day then eventually it'll be a habit and it won't be so much trouble to get to work on things. And that's true. What I didn't know was that by making it a requirement, and thereby turning it into a chore, I could bypass writer's block almost entirely.

What would often happen if I sat down and stared at the page was that I couldn't make the words flow because it was never good enough. I would think of things to say, discard them, and eventually get stuck in a YouTube hole for the next eight hours. But by making it a requirement then suddenly anything is good enough. Passages that have had me beating my head against a wall suddenly devolve into "Whatever, I guess she jumps on the table and punches the guy. I'm going to sleep now." and I can move past them. I'm building the stories sentence by sentence, day by day, and I'm actually seeing progress.

Granted, not every day is like that. Sometimes the words flow easier and I'll write as much as I can, but if it's just the single sentence I have permission to call it 'good enough'. It's both freeing and effective.

So in summary: If anyone is having trouble with writing: force yourself to write a single sentence and then call it good. And if you do it every day, then you might be surprised what you discover.