Self-Regulation: Writing on the Hardest Days

We have written a fair amount about self-regulation in relation to writing. We have discussed strategies for starting, ways to persevere, ways to navigate around procrastination, and the joy of hitting the zone. There is always room to expand this discussion, and that’s what we’ll do today!

Some days writing is easy, and other days it’s very hard. Sometimes we can start with Draft 1. Sometimes we have to start writing at Draft 0. But on days when writing is hardest we need to scale down our expectations even further. This brings us to Draft -1.

Draft -1: The Workaround for Hard Days

As the name suggests, writing Draft -1 is an even lower-stakes task than writing Draft 0, which is pretty low-stakes already. Whereas in Draft 0 we’re trying to put words down on a page, in Draft -1 we’re not even writing. Draft -1 is about pre-writing. The goal is to accumulate something: maybe some ideas, or snippets. Sometimes Draft -1 is not even in verbal form: doodles, symbols, swoops and swirls. The hope is that these somethings will coalesce into thoughts, ideas, or cleaner words.

The basic attitude behind Draft -1 is that discipline is a myth. On good or average days, we’re able to gather our powers and get a few things done even though some part of us may resist doing the thing. We use our discipline, such as it is, to get the task done. On days that call for Draft -1, no such powering-through is available—it may even be actively harmful to you. So we have to work with what we have. We have to sidestep our incapacity without disciplining ourselves!

Some writing days are just like this. Photo by Christian Bruno on Unsplash.

How? The answer gets very hazy. There’s no definite Draft -1 toolkit, only suggestions that may or may not work. This is because Draft -1 helps us pull from an unconscious horizon of tacit knowledge and sense-making. Let’s unpack this a little.

Most of our writing skill is unconscious; we don’t experience the full details of where words, sentences, and paragraphs come from. Words, sentences, and paragraphs come together against a giant background of tacit knowledge, because all language users have achieved expertise in a huge range of skills just to use language properly, much less well. Sense-making is just a process of crunching down vagueness and complexity into something we can work with. For writers, it’s crunching down the complexity of all the things you could write into the linear(ish) simplicity of things you do write.

Dealing with the unconscious is a tricky, indirect business.

Tools and Tricks for Draft -1

Some people have had decent success by starting with mind-maps. If you’re totally lost on what to write, write keywords. Circle them, or draw arrows between them. Or just lines between them. Maybe group them. Maybe a cluster of meaning will emerge from this. Perhaps something you can turn into a thought or an observation.

Some people try just talking at an inanimate object or a pet. The pets and objects will not care, of course, but the talking will be very, very low-stakes.

Some people have had decent success by throwing in some chaotic search terms into Google image search and taking some inspiration from what shows up. A good potential way to get out of a verbal blockage is to immerse yourself in something non-verbal but interesting. Random images do that for some people.

An extension of the previous idea is throwing in some phrases or sentences related to your (maybe half-baked) idea into an online AI-driven image generator like Dall-E Mini (now known as Craiyon).

These methods may not work quickly, but at the very least they’ll take away some energy from that part of us that really wants to (or needs to) procrastinate! And sometimes distracting ourselves from procrastination while (kind of) staying on task is all we need to do until the energy comes back.