writermag.com • The Writer | 37the risk of setting yourself back. What
you may do is write for two or three
sessions – still time-limited – in a sin-
gle day. Make sure you take a substan-
tial break between sessions.
Keep up this writing regimen until
you reach your target session length
and can focus again. And while you’re
at it, consider keeping that ultimate
session length to under an hour (see
“Are short sessions better?”). It’s fine if
you need to write more in a day (or
write for a living) – just be sure to take
a little break every 45-60 minutes.
Why does this work? Well, brain
pathways fatigue with use, just as mus-
cles do. Have you ever made a New
Year’s resolution to go to the gym,
showed up for one or two days of
hour-long workouts, and then,
exhausted, not been able to face going
back for weeks? This can happen with
brain chemistry, too, when long-
unused brain pathways, including
those associated with attention and
creativity, are reactivated. You need to
sneak up on these pathways –
strengthen them again without wiping
them out. Forcing yourself to stop –
deliberately before you feel ready to
stop – means you haven’t exhausted
those pathways, and they can regener-
ate more quickly to be ready for your
next bout. Eventually, you’ll be able to
sustain longer writing workouts.‘Cue’ yourself to write
We sometimes make fun of writing rit-
uals, like sharpening five pencils or
placing daffodils in a vase on the desk,
but writers who engage in these kinds
of practices are leveraging a scientific
phenomenon known as classical con-
ditioning. In classical conditioning,
when you pair a particular symbol –
say, a piece of music – with a behavior,
you will begin to elicit that behavior
every time the symbol is presented.
In Pavlov’s famous study, the symbol
was the ringing of a bell, and the behav-
ior was the salivation of a dog. Pavlov
originally trained the dogs by ringing
the bell every time he fed them.Of course, you don’t want to train
yourself to drool at the sound of
“Smells Like Teen Spirit.” But once
you’re able to have some successful
writing sessions, consider preparing for
them by presenting yourself with the
same “symbol” every time. Pick some-
thing that engages your senses. It’s very
important to reserve your chosen sym-
bolic sound, image, smell, taste, or feel
solely for your writing sessions, as they
must be paired repeatedly with only the
act of writing, and not diluted with
your other activities, to be effective. If
you’re having trouble with consistency,
try pairing your selection with a free-
writing session rather than the novel
you’re feeling stuck on.
Good choices for such symbols
might be a special tea that you save for
those late-night engagements with your
word processor, or a soft velvet robe
that you slip on only when you sit
down to work on your novel. Or maybe
you have an album of ambient music to
which you always enjoy composing. If
you use an isolation writing tool such
as OmmWriter, you may be able to
leverage built-in background music or
sounds. The symbol doesn’t have to be
overtly positive – a neutral one is fine.
Once you’ve built up a good associ-
ation between your symbol and your
writing behavior (most studies of con-
ditioning use daily pairing for a num-
ber of weeks), you’ll have a tool to get
you off the couch and to the desk. Just
put on that album, arrange those pen-
cils, or make that Jamaican Blue
Mountain Coffee that you only allow
yourself to have when you are writing,
and you should feel the urge to write.Add any or all of these techniques to
your writing toolbox to master that
monkey mind, tame that squirrel –
and, finally, finish that novel.Valerie E. Polichar has a B.A. in cognitive psy-
chology and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology
from the University of California, San Diego.
She lives, writes, and practices what she
preaches in San Diego, California.When it takes some time to
settle yourself into the pro-
cess of writing, the prospect
of having only an hour here
and there in which to write
can appear to doom your
hopes. But once you hone
your skills at focusing, you’ll
be prepared to take advan-
tage of relatively short incre-
ments of time – and that
might actually make you
more effective.
Recent research in Can-
ada found that “within-task
mental fatigue” – that is,
when your performance on a
particular activity starts to
flag meaningfully – set in
somewhere between 45
minutes and an hour into a
mentally challenging activity.
Other studies of a variety of
activities have found gradual
declines in performance over
a period of hours. But, in
general, you do better work,
solve problems more readily,
and answer questions more
accurately when you’re fresh.
Once you’ve mastered the
techniques in this article,
you’ll be ready to run with
those tucked-in, stolen half
hours, and use them effec-
tively to build toward your
writing goals.ARE SHORT
SESSIONS
BETTER?
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