How To Write When You Don’t Want To
Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash
I’m extremely grateful for the fact that I’ve been able to make a living doing something I truly enjoy. So many people simply don’t have that option, a fact that I remind myself of anytime I’m procrastinating getting to work or otherwise struggling with an assignment. What I do is a true labour of love that I would do if I wasn’t being paid a cent (as I do with this blog). The fact that I’m well compensated for my work is truly gratifying.
That being said, I don’t always love it. In fact, there are days when I feel like I’d rather be doing virtually anything else — exercising, cooking, cleaning, shovelling snow, doing my taxes . . . anything but sitting down at my computer and hammering out written content. Some days it’s a pure slog and I’m simply relieved when I’m done for the day.
Of course, I do things other than write during my days and at times I’m able to give my temperamental inner three-year-old self a break. I go to the gym. I do meal prep for the week. I take the dog out for a walk. Ideally, I can time these activities to when I really don’t want to be grinding away at a written assignment, and at the best of times they leave me feeling renewed and ready to start enjoying my craft once again.
But deadlines are deadlines, and there are times when I simply have to force myself to work. Here are six strategies I’ve come up with over the years for getting over the hump.
Chip away at it in 15-minute increments.
Here’s one technique I’ve learned. I’ll set the timer on my phone for 15 minutes, work on a written assignment for those 15 minutes, and then give myself a five-minute break. Rinse, repeat. What you choose to do for a break is up to you. Sometimes I’ll listen to a whole music album track by track, interspersed by 15-minute increments of writing. When I was writing the content for the Compassionate Alberta website, I listened to the entire Led Zeppelin catalogue in chronological order.
Give yourself a change of scenery.
Sometimes when I’m feeling frustrated with writing, it’s more about my surroundings than the process itself. Like anybody else, I start to go a bit crazy after spending too much time in one place (i.e. my office) and I can ameliorate my situation by relocating my workspace. In summer, this is often my patio, but it can be the kitchen table, the living room couch, or your local Starbucks. Sometimes a little background noise helps.
Put on some unintrusive background music/sound.
Speaking of background noise, if I’m not in a position to relocate to a coffee shop but I’m craving that ambience, I can recreate it. YouTube is replete with coffee shop background recordings and other types of background noise, like rain, waves, birdsong et cetera. Sometimes I lean on actual music, but for me personally it has to be a) purely instrumental and b) unintrusive. I personally like the impressionist piano music of Erik Satie or electronic ambient music à la Brian Eno.
Take breaks for background research/reading.
Regardless of what I’m working on, I consider background reading and research to be part of the job and I include it when I’m clocking my working hours. Aside from giving you vital information you need for your subject matter, taking breaks for reading is absolutely necessary for the writing craft. I know for a fact that my writing gets stale if I’m not doing enough reading; it’s the equivalent of weight training and cardio for an athlete. Give yourself a 20-minute break to read an article on something à-propos. It’ll help all around.
Lean on AI (a bit).
If I’m truly stuck and frustrated, I ask ChatGPT what it thinks about a particular subject. Oftentimes I find this is enough to get the juices flowing again. Of course I don’t use what Chat comes up with verbatim, but I often find that it offers suggestions I hadn’t thought of before as well as a basic structure that you can follow.
Embrace the suck.
As a long-distance runner, I know what it means to “embrace the suck.” This is when you gird yourself for the last (uphill) kilometer of a marathon when every atom in your body wants to stop except the part of your brain that refuses to give up. There’s a certain heroism in the persevering writer who is Hercules-like in their dogged overcoming of arduous writing tasks. All of history’s great writers have had their version of this, which helps me imagine that I’m in good company.
I used all the above-mentioned tactics while writing my master’s thesis (except ChatGPT, which didn’t exist at the time), but ultimately it was a wholesale embrace of the awfulness of the experience and a narcissistic fancying of myself as a persevering hero that got me to the finish line. For more on learning to love misery, read my blog post entitled The Spiritual Genius of Oscar the Grouch.
Do you have any strategies for overcoming hating the writing process that I haven’t mentioned? I’d love to hear about it if you do. Please feel free to contact me through my site or hit me up on LinkedIn.
