Face Your Fear And Fuel Your Writing Part 6: Retrain Bad Habits

Over the next ten weeks I'll be examining fear, mining from my own experience and from what I've witnessed in my peers. Hopefully this will hit some nerves (good nerves, though!) and help other writers navigate the waters of fear and find success.

#6 Retrain Your Bad Habits

Do you tend to write and rewrite an endless succession of drafts, unable to decide when a piece is finished? This is actually a common problem I hear from many writers. They often struggle to get any work done on other parts of their work because they're continually revising one particular chapter—usually chapter one.

Or maybe you're on the flip side of this problem and you hesitate even starting on a writing project because it feels too daunting, you haven't fleshed out the next chapter, or it just seems too difficult.

If you can relate to this, try setting some performance standards for yourself.

Give yourself a time limit. Say, for example, that you just keep revising and revising and revising chapter 2 of your awesome novel. Tell yourself that today you're only going to work on it for 10 minutes and then you're going to move onto chapter 3. If you're on the flip side of this problem and you can't even get started, give yourself 10 minutes to sit down and write. MAKE yourself do it. Whatever happens, happens, and then you can go procrastinate by watching TV or scrolling through Facebook. Just. Do it. Once your writing starts to come out you'll find your flow, but, like all good habits, it will take discipline and practice.

The point is to balance all the time you're wasting—be it procrastinating on a task or spending too much time on said task—with time spent on things that actually advance your goals.

I have a personal rule I try to follow when I'm working on a book: I won't create more than three drafts of a chapter before moving onto the next. Oh, I'll come back to those chapters when the book is finished and revise some more, but not until all the rest of the chapters have had the attention of three drafts. The point of this is so that I don't get in my own way.

Like any practice, the more you implement whatever standards you’ve set, the more reliable you will become. Experiment with your own ways to accept and move through your resistance.

The Rest of This Series

Part 1: Identify Fear
Part 2: Admit You're Afraid
Part 3: Shift Your Focus
Part 4: Overpowering Perfectionism
Part 5: Navigating Hardships
Part 6: Retrain Bad Habits
Part 7: Do What Scares You
Part 8: Hold Your Course
Part 9: Be Logical
Part 10: Fearing Fear