2020 Writer’s Review
By: Caro Kocel
Tags: Discipline, Sustainable Self, Creative Process, Writing, Process

2020 Writer’s Review

I love writing. I’ve learnt that words are powerful and I’ve vowed not to attach them to bullshit ever again. I didn’t know what category my writing fell into so I created a purposeless snail-mail zine so I wouldn’t be refused for publication, had a quarterly deadline for creativity, and provided the joy of receiving real mail over 1000 times. In 2020 I experimented with online publication: here I measure what matters and pave the way for 100X better next year.

2020 Writers Measure What Matters = Process

In 2020 I published one article online almost weekly. Following the mantra done is better than perfect, my shortest was 108 words “Few Words” published in April after I back-flipped my life across the planet due to the pandemic. That was preceded by the year’s longest article, 5270 words, One Week in March 2020 which chronicled the most stressful week of my life in which that backflip occurred. One Week was the most meaningful and the most painful to write; most meaningful because I wanted to record my experiences of when “the shit well and truly hit the global fan” and painful because re-living pain is painful and so is writing 5000 words in a week without planning. While I followed “The Artist’s Way” 12-week creative recovery course, I permitted myself not to publish if it felt right. A number of my weekly publications during that time were instructions shared with others who joined me on the course, which I included in my article count but not my word count.

Journaling and morning pages formed the foundation of much of the creative process. Introduced to morning pages in June, I wrote an unedited stream of consciousness and flushed the contents of my waking mind onto three pages. For 93 mornings in 2020, I wrote terrible ideas, inexplicable thoughts, nonsense, fragments and flourishes, and staked my claim on the day in the process. On 189 days, I followed four journaling prompts:

What was amazing yesterday?

How could I have made yesterday better?

What three things am I grateful for today?

How can I make today great?

Hand-writing remains central to my process. Road-testing to find the perfect notebook to buy a lifetime’s supply continues.

Writer’s Lessons

A simple way to reflect back and plan forward is to think about what you want more of and what you want less of; I call these Yes pleases and No thanks. Focus on what’s in your control (process) and acknowledge that once published (product), your words are like grown-up children with lives of their own over which you have no control.

Yes Please!

More fun please! The article I had most fun writing was The Professional Bullshit Reader’s Guide, making myself laugh hard as I used the bullshit translator dictionary. Write ups of experiments can increase play in life, for example, by promoting gambling among friends and writing it up, or gamifying life, like beginner dating and boyfriend recruitment. Interviewing people is an excellent way of learning about worlds you know little about, like dance-studio owners or professional travellers. For a cheap, quick ego-boost of higher views and reads, use a picture of a beautiful naked lady. Submitting an article about counting baked beans to a publication for entrepreneurs was hilarious and an important step towards sharing work more widely. Sharing useful fun articles with more people is wonderful, especially when rewarded with feedback. Writing an article aiming to help one friend was highly motivating, especially since most of the problems we face in life are shared.

No thanks!

Less stress, thanks. Desperately trying to finish an article before deadline is not cool. It’s easy to get a bad back from sustained seated posture for hours in the zone. It’s shameful interviewing people then not writing it up for six months by which time it’s outdated — no more of that, thanks. Lacking discipline means the writing process is haphazard, easy to procrastinate, and more stressful at weekends when you’d prefer to be resting. Based upon my practice of brainstorming in 21s, I started creating listicles of 21. But it turns out that these actually take a lot of work to complete and many of the ideas overlap. 21s brainstorming is a creative exercise to learn not to pre-edit whereas writing 21s listicles is tiring.

100X Next Year?

Following the recommendation that 10X improvement is easier than 10%, how about setting absurdly ambitious goals so that failure is still higher than an unambitious success? Multiplying writing by 10 is easiest when last year’s output was extremely low! After that, multiplying output by another 10X may necessitate a significant lifestyle change and an all too easy reduction in quality. What other ways can we build compound interest into process? All of the list below are within the writer’s control. To avoid getting side-tracked from writing itself, the first two can be automated or done by someone else.