[00:14] Rachel: Hey, writers. Welcome back to Story Magic, the podcast that will help you write a book you're damn proud of.
[00:19] Emily: I'm Emily.
[00:19] Rachel: And I'm Rachel.
[00:21] Emily: And today we are going to talk about slow writing. We get this question all of the time. We get it on Instagram, we get it from our clients. We get it in tenacious writing. We actually had a whole conversation about it in our tenacious writing community recently, where people ask, how can I write faster? And am I writing too slow? Or some version of that question of, I'm not going fast enough, is that bad? And how do I go faster?
[00:51] Rachel: Yeah, it's common. I think the best place to start talking about this is by asking, why do we feel the need to write fast? Like, why is that a thing? What does fast mean? Where do these expectations come from? And over the past year, I personally have been doing a lot of self exploration about what I feel are society's expectations for productivity, aka hustle culture. What do we believe about our work and the amount of work that we do in relation to the value that we hold for ourselves? So when I think of this question, why do I feel the need to write fast? It's essentially because society tells me that I must, that I must produce, or else if I'm not producing enough, if I'm not producing fast enough, if I'm not making money, then I am somehow lazy, less than not on top of my game. All of these negative criticisms about you come into play if you're not doing something, quote, fast enough.
[02:06] Emily: I think it is bullshit, totally bullshit. And I think it comes both from, like because that exists, that hustle mindset exists, as we all know, in every aspect of life. It exists in work, culture, in education, culture, in parenting culture, in just everything. But I think in the writing world, it's taught to us through stories because it's taught to us through the stories that we choose to celebrate. Because the number of times that I hear, well, it feels like everyone is writing their book in three months. Three months. For some reason, that's like the thing, the ideal. Everyone says the number of times I've heard that, well, this person's writing it in three months, everybody's writing it in three months, and it's taking me ten years, so obviously I'm defective. It's like, mind boggling to me. But there's so few writers who finish a book in three months. So few. There are people who do that. There are people who write a book a month, but there are a few and far between. But those stories get told to us, and then it can feel like everybody else is doing that while we're sitting on a book we've been working on for five years.
[03:22] Rachel: Right. It's a constant comparison. And as you're saying that, I'm, like, thinking, how did that become a thing? Because I've heard that too. And I've also had that expectation. And you know what? This is maybe where I internalize that message. I think we're told we have to write a certain amount of words a day. If you write 1000 words a day in 90 days, that is a book, that is 90,000 words. So if you hold this expectation that you have to write a certain word count every single day, and it would result in basic math. A book, a draft, that's another thing. A draft and a finished book are.
[04:00] Emily: Like two different two very different things.
[04:02] Rachel: Very different things. But that equals, like, basic math lines out that's three months, right?
[04:06] Emily: Yeah.
[04:06] Rachel: And that's so unrealistic.
[04:08] Emily: It's unrealistic. But it's also again, you can hear the Hustle language in that because it's factory output.
[04:14] Rachel: Right.
[04:14] Emily: That's where Hustle culture comes from, is this idea that, like, human beings can work like factories and you pump out 1000 words. You have a book. But do you?
[04:24] Rachel: Right, exactly. Do you? I think that's a good question for some writers. I think we'll talk more about this. But I also want to say, if that's your norm, if you are one of the writers that is able to write very quickly and produce and publish three books a year, whatever it is, that's fantastic. I think that that's awesome. I also think that that's not the norm or what we should be striving for in general. If that is what you do, it's healthy for you, it's working for you, it's your business, great. But if you're asking this question of how do I write faster? Because you're trying to achieve that, I think that's where we need to pause and say, why are you trying to achieve that? Is that healthy for you? Is that normal for you? Is that what works for you? And most of the time the answer is going to be no, it's not.
[05:15] Emily: That's what it comes down to. Is it working for you? Because if it is, for those folks who do write a book a month or a book every three months and they have their cadence, right? That is what works for them. But just because that's what works for them doesn't mean that that's what we should be striving to match. We have to look inward and ask ourselves, like, what is going to work for us?
[05:35] Rachel: Yeah. So we also think that one thing to write faster is not a bad thing. I think it comes from these expectations. But as we were talking about earlier, Emily, I think it also comes from and you mentioned this this desire to have our words out in the world, this story that we love and have people hold it.
[06:02] Emily: Yeah. I mean, if anybody has ever had that experience of like, you're standing in the bookstore and you're like, I want to see my book on the shelf, and you just have that visceral need and desire to have your words out, affecting people. That's very real and very normal and very okay, because that's your vision, that's your dream, right? You want to share your book and your words and your ideas with the world. And books take a really long time to write oftentimes, and that is just a longing that you're going to have until it's out there. And that's totally fine. But I think it comes down to when you're putting pressure on yourself to write faster. Where is it coming from? That question is so important because it's going to be different for everybody. And if it's coming from that place, and that place is full of excitement and exhilaration and desire, then you can recognize, okay, I'm going to get there, right? I'm on the path, I'm going to get there. That's a healthy place to be coming from. But if it's coming from a place of, oh my gosh, my friend just finished a book in three months, I'm so behind, that's a very different situation.
[07:11] Rachel: It is. So what about slow writing? How do you write slow? What does that even mean? Can you share with us a little bit about that?
[07:21] Emily: Yeah, I think it can mean a bunch of different things, but ultimately we want to figure out the pace that's going to work for us, the pace that is sustainable, the pace that is healthy. I know that you went through a lot of this when you became a mom at figuring out what that pace looked like for you. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that?
[07:46] Rachel: Yeah, I would love to actually. And thank you for asking because I had not even thought about that when we started this conversation. When I first started writing, or before I became a mom, I was the 1000 word everyday writer, but I would have just go through these periods of burnout. So I felt like I had very high producing word count values, but I was not sustainable and I was not consistent. And when I had my baby, it all just went out the window at the same time. It was still not sustainable and consistent, but I could barely even get to the page at all. And then guilt and shame and all those narratives started to compound and it just became even more difficult. And mentally, like, those first I mean, my daughter's two and a half. Now, that first couple of months, that first year, those first two years, there is a mental strain that it's not just like you're tired. Physically, like, for me, there's a mental load of, okay, now I have to make meals. Three meals a day and two snacks. And like, my brain's always moving about that. So where I'm getting with this is like, it became so much harder to get to the page and I was able to do so much less that I felt like my writing life just was in complete shambles. And then I started to sit with, why have I felt so much shame about not being able to show up? And why have I felt so terrible about not producing and not meeting the past goals that I had set for myself? Why do I feel so bad that I can no longer write 1000 words a day consistently? And through that work, I started to understand so much of those narratives were coming from the expectations put on me by society, like we were talking about earlier, to just produce. So then I decided to reframe my writing mindset and be like, I am no longer on a timeline. I am on my own timeline. I try very difficult or I try very hard not to compare myself to other people's timelines because no one has my brain besides me. No one has my body besides me. No one has my daughter besides me and my husband. But I mean, like, my life my life is so uniquely different that it's impossible now for me to try to compare myself without getting into the spiraling tunnel of self shame. And I don't need that. I don't want to go there. That's not healthy. So what I did instead was take this very conscious effort of I'm going to meet my brain and my body where they are, no matter what. If that is writing one day a month, that's what I'm going to do and I'm going to be happy about it.
[10:37] Emily: Yeah.
[10:38] Rachel: So I switched the mindset from Hustle to write 1000 words a day just because I felt like that was necessary to I'm going to write when my brain and my body feel good about it. And now that I've done that, my brain and my body feel very good about it more often than not.
[10:57] Emily: That's the thing about shame. I know we were going to talk about this later, but I want to bring it up. We talk about shame a lot because shame has so much power over our momentum. When we are shaming ourselves for not showing up, we are draining our energy and we are less likely to show up. Yes, I think that's like the and it feels backwards because you're like, if I shame myself hard enough, I'm going to show up because I don't want to shame myself anymore. But actually it's so paralyzing. It's so intensely paralyzing. And I've talked about this before, but I used to have a thing about like, I'm lazy, so I have to shame myself into working. And that made it hard to show up to the page because I wasn't showing up with a good mindset. I wasn't showing up with self love for myself, for the story. It was just like that hustle expectation of like, this is what you have to do if you're going to be a good person.
[11:46] Rachel: If you're going to be a good person. I think that snipped that for a second because that's like, what all of this kind of comes down to is like, you've attached your worth to how much you can do. And that varies at any point in the day, let alone in your month or in your year. And we all go through those ups and downs. And that's not what writing is about. You don't write to give yourself the label of good person.
[12:13] Emily: Yeah, right.
[12:15] Rachel: Like, I think that that's the unhealthy mindset of how do I write faster? If I write faster, then therefore I'll publish more, then therefore I'll be more accomplished, then therefore I'll be a good person. It's like, no, that's shame.
[12:27] Emily: You just said it right there. That mindset. And that's why I think it's so important to examine that question. Where is that coming from? Because it's coming anywhere in any way from shame. You're doing yourself a disservice. You're probably slowing yourself down. And obviously, right, being faster is not the goal here. But I do I think it's really important to note that, like, when we are beating ourselves up, we are so much less likely to show up. And if we do manage to make ourselves show up, it's not in a healthy way, and it's going to be damaging in the long run, and we're going to burn out. And so the number one thing is to examine for you, where is that coming from? Is it a fear of laziness? Did your whole life just blow up in some massive way and now you have to rearrange everything? Right? And that's one of the things we're going to talk about this book later. But in the book The Art of Slow Writing by Luis DeSalva, she talks about I can't remember who the author was, but she wrote her first book, I think in a year, a year and a half from startup idea to completed getting published. And then her second book, because she had a child, took eight years.
[13:39] Rachel: Yeah.
[13:39] Emily: And that's so fine and normal and okay. And we have to normalize the fact that big life things happen and they're going to change the way that we write. And that doesn't mean that her first book or her first experience was more important or better or made her a better person than her eight years. It's not like she failed by then taking eight years to write her second book. She still wrote it. She still published a book. Right. We put so much value on time and how much we have to produce in a specific amount of time. And it's damaging not just to us, but I think also to our stories.
[14:13] Rachel: Yes, I very much agree. I think that if I had throughout this learning journey, for me, I almost started to resent my story and I started and stopped a couple of ideas because I just felt like I put so much pressure on the idea itself that I was feeling so disconnected from the characters because I wasn't writing that idea, because I loved it. I was writing that idea because I was trying to finish a book. And so I ended up creating all of this resentment around writing, around my characters, around my stories, simply because I felt all this pressure to get it finished, to do it, to do it faster on top of my life. And it just resulted in all of this stagnation for both me as a writer and also for my book. And once I figured out, once I started to think about this and really sit with, what do I want? What do I want out of this process? What do I want to be? What do I want to teach my daughter about hustle culture? How do I want to look at writing and be healthy? What do I want to tell my clients when they're feeling burnt out? When I started looking at all of that stuff, I was like, wow. All of this pressure to do something in X amount of time was creating far more problems than it was like, actually solving. And when I fixed that and I fell, like, back in love with my story. You mentioned this earlier. The shame makes it harder to show up, and it makes you slower. Once I let go of that, I wrote faster. Yes, I did. I wrote faster. I finished almost an entire draft from November to middle of January, and that was completely crazy for me at the time, but it also felt so right. None of those months were filled with these expectations that I had to write all of that fast. I just felt really good about writing that amount of words.
[16:18] Emily: If I remember, this is nano, right? Last year, yes. You created a circumstance in which you were like, I'm feeling motivated. I want to finish my draft coming from a place of desire. So I'm going to shape boundaries in my life to allow me to do that, which I think is a really important distinction. It's not like you just woke up one day and we're like, okay, now I found time to do it. Like you made the time to do it.
[16:39] Rachel: Yes, I did. And I put those boundaries in place. Knowing two things, it's going to come out a little unhealthy, but I want to clarify. I wanted to push my limits, but not in a bad way. I wanted to see what is my healthy balance. And that needed me in this new mindset to see how much could I write without feeling burnt out?
[17:09] Emily: Yeah.
[17:09] Rachel: And I found it. I did not write myself to burnout because I was very aware of getting close to that line or knowing, today, I need to take a break. I still was very intentional about listening to my brain and my body, but I was also trying to see, well, how fast can I write? That feels good? So I did that during Nano, and I did not feel burnt out at all. I felt really great and really excited. And I asked my husband for help because I knew that I wanted to prioritize that. And I made sure that Rose was in daycare and I made sure that I wrote when she was in daycare so that I wouldn't feel exhausted when she got home or feel all these pressures.
[17:52] Emily: So.
[17:52] Rachel: Yes, I did. I put boundaries in place to make that happen because I was trying to find that balance for me. I really enjoy writing fast. I enjoy that. I think that's a natural state for me to type. That's what I'm talking about, to type fast words. I am a fast typer. I like typing fast. But I also knew that I'm not trying to get myself back to the place I was a year ago when I couldn't even get to the page at all because I was so tired.
[18:18] Emily: Yeah. Does that make sense? It makes total sense. I mean, basically what you were doing was you were like, I want to see what my body wants to do and what my limit is. And so you were very focused on how you felt in the moment, which is very different from saying, I want to reach this word count goal by this date because then I will feel worthy.
[18:36] Rachel: Yes.
[18:36] Emily: That was not your driving motivation. It was motivation was internal and it was like and I remember you got sick at the last week of Nano and you didn't meet the Nano goal, and you're like, whatever, I'm just still going to keep writing. I'm going to figure out where that limit is for me. And I think that's so different. That happens for me seasonally. So I'm a very seasonal writer. I'm very busy in the summer, and usually I write a lot in the fall and in the winter. And so once summer is coming along, I'm very sort of brain dead, but I brainstorm a lot in the spring. In the summer, I have a really hard time writing. By the time fall comes, I'm like, let's go. And I write a lot of words from September to January, and then by January I'm like, I have no words. It's taken me years to figure that out because every June I'm like, what's wrong with me? I have no words left. I don't feel like writing. Am I ever going to like writing again? I need to push myself. I have to get words done. This summer, I didn't do as much as I wanted to last spring, and it's happened probably six times now, like 6 June have passed of me going through this cycle that I know it's going to happen. And every year I still try to push myself a little bit. And then every year by July 1, I'm like, okay, we're just not going to break. Yeah, it's fine. But I think that's my body being like, you need a break. You need to enjoy summer. I do a lot of camping. Like, I'm outside, I'm doing other stuff. Yeah, but, yeah, it's like the Factory Mindset is like, you have to produce every day of the year. And it's like, no, you don't.
[20:13] Rachel: You don't.
[20:14] Emily: You're allowed to have seasons of the year, seasons of life. Every book is different, right? You have to allow for that. And the only way to figure out what's going to work for you is to turn internally.
[20:27] Rachel: Yeah. I want to say this, and I want to add this, because this comes up a lot in our writing community, and it plays off this idea of cyclical writing cycles. Your year follows the cycle, and it's the same cycle every year. And for people who menstruate, that is a cycle that happens often, and that greatly can impact those people's ability to show up on the page. And I want to acknowledge that's, okay, if you're mentoring, if you're on your period and you're exhausted, take a break. You're allowed to do that. And this comes up, it seems like every month in our community of, I'm feeling so tired and so difficult to approach the page right now. Like, I don't know what's wrong with me. And then, like, three days later, this person is like, oh, yeah, I started my period.
[21:16] Emily: Yeah, it's the exhaustion. It's also the anxiety. So for me, my menstruation cycle always, I have, like, an anxiety trigger that happens about a week before, and it makes it so hard to show up to the page because I'm overthinking everything. My perfectionism is super high. And so, yeah, that's a cycle I've had to learn to be like, okay, when that happens, we're going to try to recognize it. Sometimes it's really hard to recognize, and then we're just not going to write for a few days, and then it passes 100% cycles. There are so many cycles.
[21:46] Rachel: There's adds and flow in our life, in every piece of our life. And like you were saying, productivity, mindset, hustle, culture mindset is constant production. That is not healthy life. I think at that point, you're ignoring your body's natural signals and natural cycles of when you need to listen to it, adapt your process 100%.
[22:10] Emily: So this is a good transition into what I want to talk about, which is this amazing book. It's called the art of slow writing. It's by Luis de Salvo. And I don't know what year it was published. That probably doesn't matter, but I discovered it a few years ago after I did I did Nanowrimo, which for folks who don't know, is like a word count challenge in November to write 50,000 words. And so I had done Nanowrimo, and I picked up this book, like, the first week of December, and I was exhausted, and I was going to push through December and do, like, another 50K because that's who I was at the time.
[22:53] Rachel: Yeah.
[22:54] Emily: And I picked up this book, and immediately, like, after the first chapter, I was like, nope, we're taking December off. Because it just really it just goes so deep into all of the values of writing slowly. And so what I want to pose the question I want to pose for folks who are asking this question of, like, how do I write faster? I want to write faster, is, what if you wrote slower?
[23:20] Rachel: Mike drop boo.
[23:23] Emily: Because there is so much value in slowing down. I don't know if anyone is familiar with the slow food movement. I know Rachel wasn't what I brought them earlier, but as an environmentalist, it's like one of those things we talked about a lot in college, but it was this movement that went on. I think it was in Italy, fast food was a thing. People were eating fast, producing fast. We weren't valuing food anymore. And so this was a movement to slow down the production process, to slow down cooking process, to really enjoy the cooking process, to slow down the eating process, of enjoying food with people and connecting over food the way that we have for generations. So it's this idea of slowing down the process of producing and eating food, but then also digging into the values that come up when you do that, of like, how can you value this thing more? How can you get deeper into what it means to appreciate what you're eating? So she came up with this idea of slow writing, sort of out of that. One of my favorite quotes is from the first chapter, I think, and she says that slow writing, I thought, could be one way to slow down time, to articulate time, a way to slow down life. Like slow food, slow writing doesn't just take time, but makes time. Slow writing is a meditative act. Slowing down to understand our relationship to our writing, slowing down to determine our authentic subjects, slowing down to write complex works, slowing down to study our literary antecedents. And I love that so much because it's this idea of what if we really embrace the process and really sank into what we're trying to say and allowed ourselves to slow down so we could get deeper into our work to get deeper into what we're trying to say, to get deeper into our learning and how that learning is coming through our stories. And I just think it's so beautiful because I think the question of or like, the desire to write really fast comes from this desire to output something as if the worth of our work, it lies in how fast it comes out into the world. But we all know that that's not true. The worth of a work is so much deeper than that. Like some of your favorite books, you wouldn't care if they came out in three months or ten years or 20 years, right? You would just care about your connection to it, the depth in it, and how much of themselves the author put into the story. Right. And I just think there's something so valuable in that and in the way that that allows us to connect our lives with our work in such a powerful way that just gets thrown to the side when we try to write too fast, when we put our value on the I mean, it's quality over quantity, right? If you think about it, at its most basic, But I just want to emphasize the meaning of that because I think it's easy to just say quality over quantity, but without thinking about what that really means.
[26:36] Rachel: Right.
[26:37] Emily: Yeah.
[26:37] Rachel: And I think this kind of goes back to what we were touching on earlier, where we're not disparaging the people who put out a lot of books really fast, but we're critiquing the idea that you need to draw your worth from how quickly you put those books out. And I think that's different. As you read that quote, I just sit with all these thoughts of like, wow, as soon as I do slow down and as soon as I do let go of these expectations and I try to get to know my characters deeper and I do their backstory, which is so easy to skip over. And I make sure that I think about my message and my world building and I take the time to do those things that are easy to skip and just draft. When I do that, I feel like I write a better story, and I also end up unlocking things that later would have created blockers. So it speeds it up, really, but not like in a way of you know what I'm saying? I'm not saying, like, you slow down in order to speed up, but I'm saying that when you take the time, I feel like you do get to know your story better, you create a better work, and you go deeper.
[27:48] Emily: I really do think that the slower you go, the deeper you can get. And if that's not your goal for the story, that's fine. But I do think that a lot of us are writing because we want to connect with folks and that regardless of what your body's pace is, whether you're a fast writer or a slow writer or however long it takes you, I don't even want to label like you're fast exactly. Visibly cringe when I hear that out loud. But regardless of what your pace is and regardless of what your pace is for this book, at this stage in your life, at this season of the year, this week of the month, I still think it's worth asking, what if I slowed down a little bit? What if I went a little deeper? What if I looked at I think one of the other things is there are so many parallels to what we're going through in life and what we're putting. In our stories.
[28:40] Rachel: Yes.
[28:41] Emily: And delving into that just it makes you a better person. It allows you to connect with the world in a different way and your readers in a different way. And there's so much value in that. So I just want to say, I think what I'm trying to say is slow can be a good thing. We can put really beautiful values on the process of going slower, regardless of how whatever your pace is right now and that we can right now. We put all of the emphasis on fast equals good and slow equals bad. And I want to change that balance.
[29:11] Rachel: Yeah.
[29:12] Emily: They're just neutral terms.
[29:14] Rachel: Just neutral. Yeah. And when you hold that belief or when you change your mindset to get to this place of accepting your process and however long that takes you, your timeline, you look at your words differently, you look at your page differently, you look at each day writing differently. And I think that's a good transition into this next question of let's say you have that healthy mindset, or let's say that you're like, okay, yeah, I feel all those things. I'm going to take my time, but I also feel like I am writing a little slower than I usually do or I feel like this is a slow period in my life. What's going on? If you're thinking those questions, why do I feel like I'm writing slow? Or why am I writing slow? Can we explore that for a second?
[30:06] Emily: Yeah, for sure. And I also want to add if you're in a place like Rachel was last fall, and she was like, I want to make room to explore what my speed actually is and take a shame away from it and explore. I think this is another place to kind of look. But yeah, I think it's not a question of how do you write faster? I think that's really important. That is like, how do I become a machine?
[30:31] Rachel: Yeah, I hate it.
[30:32] Emily: I hate that question. I reject it wholeheartedly. So the better question that I would like to pose is how can I address the things that are holding me back from a healthy pace that fits my process and brain? If you're feeling like you have more space and room and energy in your life and you want to explore ways that you can write at a quicker pace, you have to look at the things that are keeping you from doing that because something is inevitably so each one of these things could be its own episode. We're going to run through kind of.
[31:10] Rachel: Pretty maybe will be.
[31:14] Emily: But why don't you break the first one down for us?
[31:16] Rachel: Yes. Okay, so the first one. So addressing the things that are holding you back, one of the I see this all the time. Procrastination. I constantly procrastinate my writing, and so therefore my writing is slow. What do I do? I think procrastination is an avoidance tool. It is an avoidance response, I should say. And you're usually avoiding some sort of fear. So if you have been for example, I've mentioned on the podcast a few times that I've been redoing my act too, and I definitely had like a week or so in there where I did nothing. And I was not doing nothing to take a break. I was doing nothing because I felt overwhelmed. I felt unsure of myself. I felt like if I didn't make the right choice in that moment, then it would make my timeline even longer to finish my book. And so basically it just resulted in inaction in procrastination. And I was avoiding those fears. I was avoiding addressing them. So if you're writing slow in quotes because you're procrastinating, you need to ask yourself, why am I procrastinating? What am I avoiding? What fear is coming up under the surface that I need to face head on and address? And once I addressed that in myself, where I was like, oh, I'm actually quite nervous. Is this the right act? Two? Did I make the right choices? Am I on the right track? And then I addressed again timeline, it constantly comes up. Am I going to finish this on time? Am I going to have to redo act to again, put my timeline backwards once more? I stopped and I was like, hey, that's not what it's about. That's not why I'm doing that. I had to reset myself. And then literally that next day I was back at the page and every day since then I've done some form of writing.
[33:06] Emily: I love it. Yeah, that actually is a really good segue into another one, which is shame. Are you shaming yourself? And shame and procrastination, like we said earlier, can go super hand in hand that you're shaming yourself and so therefore you're procrastinating because that's just how it works. You're exhausting yourself and so you don't show up. You don't want to show up because it's coming from a place of shame. And so if that, what are you shaming? Again? Turn inward. What are your shame voices telling you? What are they shaming you for? And how can you rewrite that narrative and then let go of that shame and let go of those expectations, those external expectations, and really look inwards as to what you need, what your body needs and all of that?
[33:51] Rachel: Yeah. So our next one on the list, I want to tackle distractions. So I am a distractable person because I have ADHD and I just found this out about myself in the last summer. So it's relatively new to me. But I think once I understood that that was something that my brain of how my brain works, it opened up so many doors for me. It was like a light bulb going off. This happened to me last night or the night before. I felt like my brain was ping pong. This is a very common occurrence for my brain, where I get a new idea and I have to go do it, and my brain just ping pong back and forth from all these sorts of different things. So maybe I need to check my bank account. Maybe I need to write this this post. Maybe I need to write for a little bit. Maybe I need to write an email. Maybe I need to do this client thing, and I end up doing, like, three minutes on each of those things before I cycle to the next thing. I bet it would drive you crazy, Emily. I don't know.
[34:50] Emily: It's how your brain works, girl.
[34:51] Rachel: It's how my brain works. But honestly, I didn't even realize that that was a thing that I did until I took that ADHD test. I thought everybody did that. But anyway, distractions I think everybody does.
[35:05] Emily: Everything that's going on in our heads.
[35:06] Rachel: I know distractions is a very big thing for me because my brain is constantly looking for stimulation. So when I get bored, I do something different.
[35:18] Emily: Yes.
[35:19] Rachel: What I've had to do in my writing practice is to turn on, like in Scrivener, you can do the nondistract mode where it blacks out your screen except for the page, and you can set a timer so that it won't even let you exit out of that. I also set, like, an app on my phone. I forget what type of app it's called. I want to say it's a productivity app, but I hate that word. It's called flora. And basically it sets a timer on your phone and it starts to grow a flower. And if you exit out of the app, it kills your flower.
[35:58] Emily: Poor flower.
[35:59] Rachel: Exactly. So I create a little mini emotional connection with this flower that I'm growing, and if I exit out of my app to go on Instagram, it kills it. So I have to focus. It's a focus app. So I use different tools like that. But distractions can be a really big thing where it slows you down if you're not paying attention or you're not aware of your brain's tendency to look.
[36:21] Emily: For distractions or setting boundaries around making the time to where you won't be distracted. So another one is perfectionism. This is big for me. So for my last work in progress, I spent about a year I really think it was a year just continually writing and rewriting Act One. A whole year, you guys, because I just felt like I couldn't move forward until Act One was absolutely perfect. Turns out that's the last thing that I worked on, I just finished this manuscript, like, a couple of weeks ago, and all I did in January was rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite Act One again. Because now I knew what I needed to do with it, and I needed to achieve that, but I had to do, finally, once I realized what I was doing with my Act One cycle. I had to break that by allowing myself to write a very rough zero draft. And I wrote it on I actually bought a whole computer called oh, my gosh, what is it called? A free write. Free write that only allows you to type, and it's like very hard to revise or go backwards, so you can basically only write forward. And I wrote an entire zero draft without looking at any of the words. And that was so powerful for me because it allowed me to just break out of that cycle and let myself explore the story so that then I can figure out what I wanted to do. And I spent the next year writing the next draft. And so perfectionism can totally slow you down. If you're in the cycle of revising and revising and revising, you're not letting yourself make mistakes. If you're not letting yourself move forward until everything is perfect, you're never going to reach the end. And so that's an important one to examine and work through. And I'm sure we'll do many episodes of this.
[38:12] Rachel: Let's talk really fast about some tools, some tricks, how you might work through these things we just talked about, and free yourself up for more space to get to that healthy pace that fits your process and brain. I'll start. One of the first ones I just mentioned were those focus apps. Those focus apps really helped me, and they really helped me get into Flow State, which is where it's like hyper focus in the ADHD brain, and I can get a lot of work done that feels very good. So any type of apps that can support that for you, I think are very good to try out and see if they help.
[38:56] Emily: Love it. So one of my favorite things to do is lean on other people. When I was finishing my last job, there were certain scenes, I mean, everybody's experiences certain scenes that bring up procrastination resistance in you for various reasons. And so something I would do is I have a friend that I would text and be like, let's sprint.
[39:15] Rachel: Need a 30 minutes sprint.
[39:16] Emily: I just have to start. And so he and I would jump on Zoom, we'd do a 30 minutes sprint. And at that point, the gears would be going again, and I'd be through that fear of whatever I was fearing for the scene. And so whether it's I know you do a bunch of group sprints or just sprints with individual friends can be such a helpful tool for procrastination, for distractions, for perfectionism, for breaking through all of those things to keep yourself moving forward.
[39:45] Rachel: Yeah. So in our writing program, in our Tenacious Writing Program, which is our writing community and our craft resource tool, Tenacious Writing, we do monthly. There are multiple times a month, but we do group, we call them write togethers, where we do we hop on a Zoom call. We all write and we share what we're working on. And those are fantastic for me because sprinting with other people, I feel like those help me excel so much and they also are the focus. So if you're looking for that and you want to try something out, join Tenacious Writing because we do these group write togethers all the time and they are so helpful and very encouraging to be alongside another writer.
[40:32] Emily: Absolutely. This next tip comes from the art of slow writing is something that Luis Desavo talks about. She calls it a ship's log. But this is kind of a trick to it's not to make you write faster or help you show up to the page or whatever, but it's more to show you that you are most likely almost definitely doing more than said producing, but you are almost definitely doing more than you think. And so what she suggests is to just like, I mean, real basic, keep a log, a little journal of what you did, when you're journaling or when you show up, how you feel, what your plan is and then afterwards how it went and how you feel at the end. And it's a really interesting way. I did it for about a month and a half when I first read this book. And it was so illuminating because I realized that I was doing a lot more than I thought because we don't have very good memory when we look backwards on what we've accomplished. But also it was a little record of kind of how my sessions were going and what wasn't working. And so I was able to kind of recognize when I was having a hard time, was it because of shame? Was it because of how I was talking about myself or how I showed up to the page or something else? And so it's just a really interesting way to kind of look at your process and look inward and just keep track of how much you are doing. You're doing so much. And she means track everything, whether you're putting words on the page or not.
[42:03] Rachel: Yeah, I love that. I'll do another plug for tenacious writing. We have a whole writing process. Writing routine workshop. It's basically a course within our program to help you develop a writing routine that works for you, that is going to be sustainable and consistent. And a part of that is doing a very similar activity of tracking what it is that works for you and what it is that doesn't work for you, so that you can build your routine around that and build your routine around how your brain works. So if that's something that you've never done before, come do it with us. I love this workshop. I love this course. And Finish Writing is a place to be for that. So this is another it's very effective to open your eyes.
[42:48] Emily: Love it.
[42:49] Rachel: Okay, last little, last little nugget here. I have found in my personal craft or in my personal practice, that learning about writing craft helped me be more effective with my writing time and write faster with an asterisk. Because once I learned writing craft and once I felt like I was understanding it and being able to implement it on the page, I stopped secondguessing myself. I know that I'm going to have to revise the shit out of my drafts. That's just how this process works. I'm going to have to revise it. That's how things go. But I also know with the knowledge of writing craft that I have I have so much confidence in myself and in my decisions and in the bones of my story that I don't spend time, a lot of time. I just shared an example like five minutes ago. I did spend some time, but I don't spend a lot of time second guessing myself. I don't spend a lot of time anymore worried about, am I doing this right? Oh, no.
[44:02] Emily: For me, for the year that I was rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting my act one, that's a very different circumstance than you realizing that you wanted to do something different with act two and kind of hemming and hawing about what, for like a couple of weeks. Yeah, totally different.
[44:19] Rachel: So if that's what you do, is every time you get to the page, you second guess yourself and you worry, am I making the writing choices? Craft is a good place to learn so that you can build that confidence. But what I'm getting towards is you need more confidence in yourself. So however you're going to build that, build that confidence because it will help you write faster. You will stop second guessing yourself. That saves you a lot of time.
[44:46] Emily: Yeah, absolutely.
[44:49] Rachel: All right.
[44:51] Emily: Yeah. This is amazing.
[44:52] Rachel: This is a good one.
[44:53] Emily: Thank you for asking these questions, folks.
[44:56] Rachel: Yes. So actually, speaking of questions, if you have a question that you would like us to address on the podcast, we're already getting emails, which is amazing. Yeah, whatever writing related thing, craft mindset, community that you want us to tackle, please send us an email at [email protected]. Put podcast question in the subject line and ask away. We plan to do listener question episodes and we will address it and give you some advice and coaching on those episodes to send us your questions.
[45:32] Emily: Awesome.
[45:33] Rachel: Okay, so if you want to build a successful, fulfilling, and sustainable writing life that works for you, you've got to get on our email list.
[45:41] Emily: Sign up now to get our free email course, the Magic of Character Arcs. After seven days of email magic, you'll have the power to keep your readers flipping pages of the Night link in the show notes.
[45:51] Rachel: We'll see you there.
[45:52] Emily: Thanks, guys.
