How One Simple Technique Transformed My Approach to Writing
By: Silvi Demirasi
Tags: Writing Life, Self, Advice, Habits, Writing Tips

How One Simple Technique Transformed My Approach to Writing

A scarcity mindset was the only thing blocking me from writing

Photo by Jaelynn Castillo on Unsplash

There was a time when the mere thought of writing would initiate a series of sophisticated procrastination maneuvers, all tirelessly executed by the Department of Ego Protective Services.

The main line of defense took on the clever guise of the “to-do list.” I’d take one of the several innocuous white notepads lying around and scribble one task after the other until my chicken scratch met the bottom of the pad. “Write a blog post” bumped elbows with low-investment items like “handwash delicates” and “scrape dog hair out of carpet.”

My writing goals crouched among the notepad filler, a self-manufactured busyness. Unsurprisingly, this proved to be successful in stalling any writing efforts. At least, for a while. The call to write would remain a lukewarm suggestion, an aspiring North Star. The hypothetical blog post would stay hypothetical. Any surfacing guilt rendered our living space free of the rolling tumbleweeds of dog hair that often plagued the apartment.

With passing time, the call to write, previously this suggestive whisper, grew a louder and unpleasantly croaky voice. Its presence drained the satisfaction that I would once get from organizing my kitchen pantry. It infiltrated my supposedly “high-level” ego defense mechanisms, mentally dismantling all of the other items on the to-do list for the straw-men that they were.

The voice, while painfully parched, was unrelenting. Did I want to write? What was I waiting for? All of these seconds, minutes, hours, frittered away…A shame to have prioritized the removal of all those dog hairs when they keep returning. Here’s one now…

It was then the pendulum of procrastination began its forceful descent. I’d do a dramatic display of flinging the notepad with my to-do list across the room. I would batten down the hatches, which amounted to putting on a pair of leggings that could weather a three-day writing bender. I’d dive headfirst into a self-perpetuated fugue state that fueled me to write from an anxious, manic beginning to its undignified, bitter end, with little rest in between.

For a decade, sitting down to write anything conjured the feeling of frantically swimming through a dark, underwater tunnel, thrashing my arms and legs forward for fear I would run out of oxygen before I reached the light. If you’ve been here, you know that this cortisol-spiking Jekyll-and-Hyde existence is not the making of a sustainable writing practice. A part of me knew this too, which is probably why my subconscious worked tirelessly to keep writing at bay.

The tension of fear gripped me tightly as I wrote. The constricted flow of oxygen in my lungs tended to abate any creative fire within me. Believing you’re always running on empty makes it difficult to write. The nature of the writing process is that it requires you to give, and give some more, and give a third time just for good measure, all without a sure-fire guarantee that you’ll be left with anything substantial in the end.

That’s because the output of writing is consistently inconsistent. An hour one day could produce a whole series of blog posts, while several hours another day could leave you with little more than a strained neck and pit stains.

Focusing on the output is what prompted the reactive nature in which I approached writing. Beneath that frenetic energy was the fear of wasting time.

Merely being aware of a scarcity mindset is not enough to discard it. In order to afford a much bigger oxygen tank for my writing practice, I needed to replace, not repress, my belief around time scarcity.

But how do you even begin to transform a self-limiting belief that produces thoughts of lack?

I thought about the converse of scarcity, the belief of abundance, and how I could integrate that into my writing practice. In search of an answer, my mind drew a natural comparison to gratitude journaling. Practicing gratitude is an approach that has been repeatedly proven as the key to propagating further feelings of abundance and general well-being.

Following the approach of counting one’s blessings, in order to shift my mindset from an hourglass that’s half-empty to one that’s half-full, I was going to count the minutes I spent writing.

From the outset, I knew I had to be generous with what I counted as writing. I tracked and tabulated all of the minutes I spent not just physically putting pen to paper, but any time I spent in the pursuit of writing. Otherwise, I’d fret over how much time I spent writing versus doing other things that facilitated the writing process, e.g., brainstorming, outlining, THINKING.

I counted each of the twelve minutes I spent staring at a blank Word document, or the half-hour I spent scrawling my outline in shorthand only to scrap it into oblivion. I counted each press of the key, whether a letter or the backspace button.

Every cluster of minutes I’d sling over my back and dump into Google Sheets at the end of the week. The weekly accumulation became my internal measurement of progress. A growing number of minutes did not signify inefficiency; it indicated substantial growth. With each week’s tracking, I affirmed and reaffirmed that the time I had spent writing I gave willingly to my practice. This was time spent wisely.

A year later, counting time tethers me to my daily writing practice. What about this tracking method is so grippingly compelling?