Last night I was going through an old notebook when the following words jumped at me.

The very activity which gives me the greatest pleasure makes me suffer beyond anything. Writing doesn’t come to me in sentences or paragraphs. It comes in words or phrases, the disjointed blurb which makes sense only to my muddled mind with lots of blank spaces where a keyword is missing. I am forever looking for the right word to complete that thought, word that exists in my mind, the word that I have read so many times before but I cannot seems to recall it. Sometimes I find its closest companion. Then begins the task of compiling the incoherent rambling in some sort of order so that it makes some sense at all. Why do I torture myself with all this day in and day out? Why do I bother? Why can’t I be like other girls? Looking for new cosmetics instead and having a facelift at the new parlour of which they have taken membership all paid for by their lovers or husbands.

I don’t even know who the original writer of these words is, I failed to record it. But I recorded these words because they describe my state of mind and perhaps of every writer’s state of mind working on their craft.

Writing is hard but it bears a lot of gifts. Over time I am beginning to understand that writing itself is a gift given to only a select few. It gives you an opportunity to live life with an intensity not available to everyone.

Writing motivates you to look closely at life as it lurches by and tramps around, says Anne Lamott. She finds in writing what Carl Sagan found in science — profound awe, deep reverence, a source of spiritual elevation.

She writes in Bird by Bird:

In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here? … Think of reverence as awe, as a presence in and openness to the world. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds. When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

[…]

There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.

If you give freely, there will always be more. … It is one of the greatest feelings known to humans, the feeling of being the host, of hosting people, of being the person to whom they come for food and drink and company. This is what the writer has to offer.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird

She goes on to say:

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.

Bird by Bird is a must read for writers, a gift by a writer to the writers to understand gift of writing given to them by god.

Photo by Lina Trochez on Unsplash

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One of my writing buddies had a rant last week when she was due to submit an assignment. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? She lamented. Who cares about my story? What difference does it make if I write this story? Or any story for that matter? I am such a crappy writer anyway.

I could feel her pain. I have asked myself the same questions a number of times. So many times I wanted to give writing up. Writing is an ordeal even for experienced and bestselling writers. New writers have very little chance of making a name for themselves, let alone earn an income from it.

What if we give up writing.

Sure the world will not come to standstill. No one will miss us because we haven’t been ‘discovered’ yet. Hardly anyone reads our blog articles and our short stories and novels are still buried in our computers. If we stop writing now the world will be spared of the rubbish we create and we will be spared the daily agony and can get on with our lives just like ‘normal’ people.

Except for one thing.

We will never find out what would have happened had we stuck with it.

The problem with giving up is that it is such a knee-jerk response. It is our first instinct when things get difficult. Our physiological mechanism to protect us from danger and undue hardship.

We tend to forget that, even at a time of grave danger, our inbuilt physiology gives us three choices — freeze, flee, or fight. Most of the time we choose to freeze (inaction) or flee (run away).

We rarely opt for the fight. It is because we tend to think the enemy is too big and too strong and the best chance we have of survival is to flee from it.

What happens when people stick it out.

Have a read of these three stories.

1. Carl Friedrich Gauss was born in Germany to poor, working-class parents. He didn’t know his birthday. His mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension (which occurs 39 days after Easter). 

So strong was his obsession with finding his birthdate that it led young Gauss to derive methods to compute the date of Easter, both past and future years. He eventually was able to figure out that he was born on 30 April 1977. His obsession led Carl Friedrich Gauss to become one of the most outstanding mathematicians of all time.

2. James Hutton got interested in meteorology and geology many years after successfully taking a degree as Doctor of Medicine and working as a physician, introducing experimental agriculture in his own farmland and establishing profitable chemical manufacturing business. He devoted 25 years of his later life “studying the surface of the earth, and was looking with anxious curiosity into every pit or ditch or bed of a river that fell in his way,” developing the theory that geological features were not static but underwent a perpetual transformation over long periods of time. James Hutton is now known as the father of geology.

3. When Claude Hopkins came into advertising, the advertising was a haphazard way of creating awareness for products and depended more on chance and exposure to sell rather than proven and scientific methods. He took disorganized marketing and added core principles to it.

What do all these men have in common?

They followed their obsession. 

One of the common themes that most smart people have is “sticking with it”.

When you stick with a problem, you learn to solve it. Slowly and slowly you start getting better at it. Your learning accumulates and you start gaining confidence.

When I started my blog two years ago I couldn’t write even a few paragraphs. I agonized over them for hours. I wrote, and rewrote, and rewrote. It was taking me 7–8 hours to write 700–800 words articles. I would work till midnight to write while fully aware no one was reading what I was writing.

I thought it will get easier in three months, or six months or even a year. But it didn’t.

Then at some point late last year, I realized I am writing 1200 to 1500 words articles and I am doing them in much less time than before.

I had devised several little ways to improve my productivity.

I had discovered to break the writing process into small steps and to spread them over several days. I learned to do my research beforehand and save it in such a way so that I could easily retrieve it. I became regular, writing two articles each week.

At some point, the penny always drops.

t’s almost like one of those slot machines. It seems like you’re not getting anywhere in a hurry and then suddenly you have this gush of coins. But unlike a slot machine that mostly works against you, ‘sticking it out’ is almost predictable in its reward system. Stay with something for about a couple of hours every day, find a system to learn, and suddenly you will nail it.

Rather than stop writing why not do the opposite and “write a lot”.

You will be pretty hopeless in the first six months. And you’ll be just about average for at least a few years. Which isn’t to say that you will not get better. It’s just to say that you’re quite far away from where you want to be.

However, you are getting better in a small incremental way. So small that you don’t even notice it. Then one day, someone raves about the article you wrote, or poem you composed or the story you published.

And voila! your confidence soars. You realize you are not that bad after all.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

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I shouldn’t have left article writing to the last hour of the day. Every time I do that I regret it. I was tired, struggling to concentrate and writing was the last thing my brain wanted to do. I waited all day for this peace and quiet, finished all the household chores, to write this article, and here I was, just wanting to curl up in the bed with a book.

I was not sleepy. In fact, I stayed up for another two hours watching a movie.

I am a night owl. I am supposed to work best at nights.

Yet my brain was categorically saying no to writing.

Why was it so?

I can do editing, diary, and journal writing at night but when it comes to writing fresh content I struggle.

Is there another factor in play other than the time of the day?

Apparently there is and it is called energy.

In psychology, energy is defined as an ability or willingness to engage in cognitive work. Just like physical work needs an optimum energy level, so does mental work. Our Brain needs a lot of fuel (oxygen and glucose) to carry out the mental work. And when these fuel levels get depleted we experience mental fatigue.

The most common symptoms of mental fatigue include mental block, lack of motivation, irritability, and stress eating.

For many people the energy levels are at their peak in the mornings. As they go through the day they steadily burn energy stores as they tackle various tasks. Even mindless tasks consume energy.

Others might experience peaks at mid-mornings, afternoons, evenings, or even at midnight.

Night owl might be able to stay awake late at night but they will only be able to tackle high energy tasks only if their energy is also at the peak at the night time.

We don’t need to practice time management, we need to learn energy management.

Not every hour of the day is same in terms of energy level. Basically we have three energy levels – peak, middle and low.

All those tasks that require high energy input should be done when our energy levels are at their peak. So some of us it first thing in the morning for others it is in the middle of the afternoon.

Writing is high energy-consuming activity. Leaving it for the time when my energy levels were low was the reason I was feeling blocked. The next morning I was able to finish the article within half an hour.

When is our energy level at its peak?

Scientist says it is it’s roughly 2-4 hours after we wake up. Our brain has gone through all the previous day’s information and filed it appropriately. It has plenty of fuel (oxygen and glucose )and it is ready to do the work that requires lots of concentration.

That is the reason most of the writers write in the morning. Maria Popova of Brain Pickings created an interesting visualization depicting the correlation between wake-up times, literary productivity and major awards of 37 writers whose wake-up times were available.

Mason Curry studied the daily rituals of writers for years and wrote about it in his blog. Eventually, he published a book Daily Rituals, in which he has presented the routines and working habits of 161 creative minds, among them – novelists, poets, playwrights, composers, painters, philosophers, and scientists. It is packed with anecdotes about getting up super early, staying up super late, drinking heroic amounts of coffee, taking precisely timed naps and long daily walks, and much more.

So what time of the day is best for writing?

When your energy levels are at their peak. And it is different for different people. Usually, it is 2-4 hours after you wake up.

Create a schedule to maximize those hours and make sure not to waste them on the tasks that can be done when middle or low energy levels.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

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