In Writing as in Revision, Go For the Low-Hanging Fruit

Pop quiz: what is one talent writers are nearly universally good at?

Answer: making life more difficult for ourselves than it should be.

While on vacation at the beach with my family this summer, I caught myself thinking about apple picking. I was in a T-shirt and shorts and a giant watermelon was very much in evidence, and yet, fall was in the air. Ah, fall—season of apples.

We used to go apple picking occasionally when I was growing up, but only started doing it regularly when I was a young adult, and various relatives developed a taste for baking pies. As adults, we’ve got a great advantage over kids: we’re taller. We have an easier time reaching more of the tasty fruit.

I see writers all the time who stretch past the bounty on the lower branches and aim only for the big ambitions at the top of the tree…and struggle. By reaching I mean a whole host of unfortunate writing habits, including refusing to do smaller or less “prestigious” projects in favor of being precious with our writing; only writing once we’ve arranged our workspace to perfection; and getting stuck trying to make big revisions on our manuscripts rather than taking the easy route.

What’s our problem? In writing, as in revision, editors recommend: go for the low-hanging fruit.

Recipe for writer’s block

Aiming only for perfection—especially in early drafts—and its cousin, overthinking in general, is a great way to get stuck. In my experience, there is no better way to assure you’ll never finish your manuscript. Stop thinking so much. Don’t make every sentence perfect the first time through, don’t spend hours rearranging your desk before you get started, don’t set yourself Herculean goals. What you want are a series of easy wins.

As human beings, we have a well-established lazy streak. We like to do easy stuff. It’s much easier to eat a bag of chips than cook. It’s easier to coach from the couch than from the bench. And it’s way easier to write a chapter, or a paragraph, or a sentence, when you decide in advance that you don’t care about quality—hell, you just need words on a page.

Harvesting low-hanging fruit while writing

Here are some ways to set up easy wins for yourself while writing:

• Write a crappy scene or a crappy intro. Decide in advance it’s going to be crappy. Celebrate how awful it is. If you have friends also writing books, you can arrange to have a session (perhaps with wine?) reading your terrible scenes aloud to each other. It’s better than Mad Libs.
• Cover your screen while writing or blindfold yourself so you can’t judge your words until later. Variation: record yourself instead of writing at the computer.
• Set word count minimums that you can comfortably achieve. Unless you are Steven King, don’t start with 1,000 from a dead stop. If you’re on a roll, by all means, keep going! Variation: build in rewards for every extra 200, 500, or 1,000 words you achieve beyond your minimum (dare I say, a “wordfunding” campaign?? ba-da-bum).
• If you’d previously decided to write Chapter 8, or a certain scene or narrative on Tuesday, but on Tuesday you REALLY don’t want to deal with it and would rather jump to Chapter 13 or the big shoot-out, write Chapter 13 or the big shoot-out on Tuesday.
• Stop rearranging your desk. Practice writing occasionally in situations that are less than ideal for you. If you train yourself to only be able to write with the CD of the wind in the Japanese garden 15 minutes after you’ve had a cup of coffee and wearing your favorite socks, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Harvesting low-hanging fruit while revising

Revising activates all sorts of judge-y attitudes and is therefore a great setup for procrastination. Make your life easier by:

• Grouping and prioritizing your changes.
• Starting with the changes that are the most fun (yes, they exist).
• Stop checking your spelling. I am not fooling around. Spelling is not revision! Get someone else to do this for you later.
• Set a schedule and a timer. Do runs of 20 minutes of revision, or 30 minutes, etc. When the timer goes off, stand up, stretch, jog around the kitchen, etc. Don’t do runs of more than 90 minutes. After 90 minutes, take a longer break.
• If you’ve been banging your head against your desk about Chapter 13, abandon it for now. Go for an easy win.

The bottom line

Writing and revising can be hard enough. We don’t need to make them harder for ourselves by refusing to look at the fruit at the bottom of the tree and instead climbing ladders all the time. At some point, you’re going to get tired, or you’ll fall off the ladder, and you won’t even have enough fruit to bake a decent pie. Stop the madness! The goodness is right in front of you—even a child should be able to reach it.

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Need help getting clear on your book? Want to get out of your own head? Let’s chat. I have a one-on-one coaching spot available, or you might benefit from outline development.

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