By Greta Boris //
Two cool tools to help you get into the flow are brain dumps and Pomodoros.
While Megan’s greatest challenge is often finding the time to write as she mentioned in her post Prioritize, Schedule, and Be Flexible, mine is mindset. If I’m not in the right frame of mind, the whole writing process morphs from creative dance to chain-gang shuffle. Insecurity is the ball and chain. The two things that breed that insecurity are not knowing what I should write and doubting my ability to write it even if I do.
How Do You Know What to Write?
Psychologists estimate the average person in a first-world country makes somewhere around 35,000 decisions a day. Apparently we use two separate methods. One is the logical examination of options. The second is more unconscious and emotionally driven—the gut reaction.
Obviously, the first is more time-consuming and tiring. We have limited resources for logical decision-making. After 50 to 75 of them, we run out of steam. The gut reaction process is both quicker and much less exhausting to our brains.
Plotters have an easier time with this problem than pantsers because they make many decisions in advance. However, even when the general story is known, there are plenty of gritty details that can only be hashed out on the page. And there’s something incredibly intimidating about a blank screen and a blinking cursor. It’s like your computer is impatiently tapping its fingers at you.
Therefore, if we are able to reduce the number of logic-driven decisions we have to make when we sit down to write, we will write faster and without as much stress. Hence the brain dump.
Here’s How Brain Dumps Work:
You open a fresh, clean document, check your Fiction Plot Map, outline, or whatever you’ve used to plan your day-to-day work and discover you need to write chapter five.
What do you know about chapter five already? Can you answer these questions in brief?
- Where does the scene take place?
- Who is in it?
- What’s the point?
- Where’s the tension?
Once you’ve answered these questions, it’s time to dump. You can set a timer for this exercise, or you can just write until you’re done. Your choice. I don’t usually time a dump.
Close your eyes if you can type with your eyes shut and visualize the scene you plan to write as if it were a movie. Now begin to take snapshots with your words of what you’re seeing, sensing, hearing, and feeling. You will not write in full sentences. Separate the words and phrases by commas only. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, word choice, or anything writerly. Go!
Here is a brief example from To Dye For, a book I’ll be publishing this fall:
Imogene enters, cold, sterile, white tiles, floor is concave, a drain at the center, smells of chemicals, gurney near drain, woman in green dress lying on it, it’s Trudy, loss, repulsion, comes closer, peaceful, Carlton too cheerful, makeup, hair dye, all in bag, he turns to leave, fear, don’t leave me, Trudy won’t bite
Can you see how many decisions I made in these few lines? Not only that, but by visualizing instead of trying to logic it out, I’ve pushed my brain into instinct mode. Now when I actually write the scene, the only decisions I have to make are about word choice, phrasing, and so on. I already know what happens.
Next, Gamify Your Writing with Pomodoros
Once you’ve got your brain dump at the top of your page, it’s time to write the scene. To harken back to the ball-and-chain analogy at the beginning of this post, if not knowing what to write is the ball, doubting your skill is the chain. The best way I have found to stop doubting my skill is to stop thinking about it.
Here’s an exercise: Don’t think about an elephant.
Of course, everyone has just imagined the big, gray beast. The only way to stop thinking about an elephant is to think about a rabbit—or something else. Enter the Pomodoro.
A Pomodoro is a fancy way of saying a writing sprint. Turn on a timer or use an app like Flat Tomato, set your timer for 25 minutes and go. When the timer goes off, take a 5-minute break, record the number of words you wrote, then repeat the process. I like to see if I can improve on my previous word count with each writing sprint.
Pomodoros force your brain to think about something else, like numbers. Instead of wringing your hands over the keyboard, your job is to get as many words on the page in 25 minutes as you can. During that 25 minutes, you can’t use the delete or back buttons. It would be counterproductive. You want more words, not less.
But What If They’re Terrible Words?
That’s not the concern at the moment. The concern is quantity, not quality. Besides, according to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, intuitive decisions are often better than conscious ones. And, remember, you can’t edit a blank page. Fixing the bloopers comes in the revision stage of writing.
This week try out the above methods if you don’t currently use them, and let us know what you think on The Author Wheel Facebook page.
Want more in this blog series? Visit https://authorwheel.com and take a free Author Personality Quiz while you’re there.
GRETA BORIS is the author of The 7 Deadly Sins. Ordinary women. Unexpected Evil. Taut psychological suspense that exposes the dark side of sunny Southern California. Her stories have been called atmospheric, twisty, and unputdownable. She lives in Mission Viejo and describes her work (and her life) as an O.C. housewife meets Dante’s Inferno. You can visit her at http://gretaboris.com.