Three Simple Steps to a Satisfying Writing Session

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Throughout the early years of my writing life, I rarely had satisfying writing sessions.

It wasn’t uncommon for me to get lost in research rabbit holes or relentlessly re-read old work, and I often toggled from chapter to chapter in search of scenes I "felt" like writing. Never mind the many days I procrastinated my creative work to the point that I'd spend ten exhausted minutes fruitlessly attempting to write before bed.

Does my experience sound familiar, writer? If so, then take heart. You don’t have to remain trapped in this endless cycle of unsatisfying writing sessions forever. In fact, you can break free in as little as three simple steps.

These steps aren’t designed to help you optimize your writing sessions. There are plenty of strategies for achieving that goal, such as writing when your creative energy peaks and recreating the environment in which you write best.

Instead, these three steps exist to help you stop dawdling and start writing, to trade procrastination and dissatisfaction for the assurance that you can give your writing your best each and every day.

I first shared these tips on my Instagram stories earlier this week (catch them in my highlights @kristen_kieffer), and I knew from the response that I just had to expand upon and re-share those ideas here on the Well-Storied blog. 👇

Three Simple Steps to a Satisfying Writing Session

Are you ready to say goodbye to the guilt and frustration of dissatisfying writing sessions? Now’s the time to implement this simple method for writing with clarity, focus, and intention.

Step #1: Identify Your Session Highlight

When not moving through your day with intention, it can be all too easy to act against your best interests. Instead of tackling a tough revision or structuring your story’s messy middle, you chase the ease of shiny new story ideas and research rabbit holes. Or maybe you choose not to write altogether.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with enjoying easy creative work or taking breaks to rest and recharge. But when you prioritize these interests over making meaningful progress on high-priority projects, you embrace the vicious procrastination cycle that leads to creative stagnancy and unfinished work.

So how do you fight the pull of low-priority tasks and unnecessary breaks?

Step one is to identify a highlight for each writing session you intend to complete. Think of this highlight as your top creative priority for the day, the one thing that you know you must do to walk away from your writing session with a sense of pride and satisfaction.

If you aren't sure what that highlight might be, then ask yourself questions such as:

• If I could only make progress on one writing project today, then what project should that be? Which is most important to me?

• What are my current writing goals, and what’s one action I could take that would help me make meaningful progress toward achieving them?

• Will I feel guilty or frustrated if I don’t work on a certain project today? If I don’t complete a certain writing-related task?

• What creative work have I been avoiding lately, and why have I been avoiding it? Am I holding myself back from reaching my goals?

Step #2: Determine a Session Goal

After determining your session highlight, take a moment to consider whether that highlight is specific and actionable.

One of the biggest reasons that writers procrastinate creative work is that they only have a vague impression of what they’d like to achieve during their writing sessions. Maybe they want to work on drafting or revising a particular project, but they don’t have a clear and actionable goal in mind.

So if your session highlight is a bit vague, then now’s the time to give yourself a specific mission for your writing session. Set parameters around how you’ll define writing success for the day.

Do you want to draft a particular chapter or revise for a certain amount of time? Are there a specific number of research articles you want to read? How about a character questionnaire you’d like to complete? The more actionable your goal, the more satisfaction you’ll feel when you achieve it.

Speaking of which, if you’re feeling motivated and ready to write after defining your session goal, then go ahead and dive in. Seize the day. If, however, you still feel resistance to creative work, then have no fear. It’s time to move on to step three…

Step #3: Address Your Behavior Blocks

Clarity in goal-setting can help you work with focus and find satisfaction in your creative efforts. But clarity itself isn't always enough to help you push through resistance and write.

If you find that you’re still procrastinating after setting a clear and actionable goal for your writing session, then it’s time to take a step back and address your behavior blocks.

In his book Tiny Habits, author and social scientist B.J. Fogg details what he calls the Fogg Behavior Model, a formula that determines whether someone will engage in a particular behavior based on three key components:

• Motivation

• Ability

• Prompt

As a formula, the Fogg Behavior Model reads as follows:

B = MAP

or

Behavior = Motivation & Ability & Prompt

In laymen’s terms, Fogg posits that behaviors occur when motivation, ability, and prompt converge at the same moment. With that in mind, you can use the Fogg Behavior Model to investigate why you put off creative work.

According to Fogg’s model, behaviors don’t take place without a trigger or prompt. So the reason you procrastinate writing might be as simple as failing to define when you’ll do the work. When could be a certain time (e.g., every day at 7:00 am) or after a certain behavior (e.g., after you eat dinner). Whatever the case, the lack of a catalyst can lead you to repeatedly put off writing.

If you’ve defined a clear prompt for your writing sessions but you’re still struggling to make the work happen, then it’s time to address the other two behavioral components: motivation and ability.

It’s easier to understand how these two elements interact when you map the Fogg Behavior Model on a graph:

Whether a behavior will take place when prompted depends upon whether motivation and ability intersect above or below the graph’s action line.

So if you’re procrastinating creative work despite the existence of a prompt, then there’s an issue with your motivation or ability — or both.

In my experience, if you’re delaying (or even forgoing) creative work for no discernible reason, then you’re likely feeling demotivated because you doubt your ability to do the work. Because fear insists that you aren’t capable.

This is where those limiting beliefs we keep talking about come into play. If you believe that there’s no point in tackling a tough revision because you’ll never get it right, then there’s a damn good chance you aren’t going to sit down and work on it anyway. You’re too demotivated about your ability to do the work.

So, how do you fight back? By getting reasonable, writer.

Uprooting your limiting beliefs and cultivating confidence in your ability to complete difficult creative work will help you in the long run. But you can’t cultivate that confidence without taking action — and to take action, you need to get reasonable about your writing goal.

The next time you put off writing, take a good hard look at the time and energy available to you, as well as any self-limiting narratives that might be running through your head. If you’re short on resources or self-belief, then you need to alter your goal to meet yourself where you’re at.

In Tiny Habits, Fogg explores how one’s sense of ability improves when a behavior becomes simpler to complete. And in my experience, simplicity breeds motivation. Maybe not a ton, but enough.

Which leads us to a common refrain here at Well-Storied: If you want to build a sustainable writing habit, one in which you’re confident in your ability to complete difficult creative work, then you need to start by writing small.

Take your goal and break it down, again and again, until you reach a goal so laughably tiny that even fear can’t convince you to forgo taking action.

Maybe that goal is ten minutes rather than an hour. Or five minutes. Or one.

Maybe it’s 200 words rather than a thousand or one revised page rather than ten. It can even be a paragraph or a single sentence. Or an action as simple as putting your fingers on keys. Whatever you can manage is enough because all progress is good progress.

When you've identified a reasonable goal for your writing session, commit to it. Give your writing everything you have until you complete your goal for the day. Even if your goal is just one minute of work, you have the power to make that minute the most focused sixty seconds of your writing life — and then to complete the process all over again the next day.

Speaking of which, the beautiful thing about tiny goals is that they help you cultivate consistency in your writing life without limiting you. Just because you set a tiny goal for yourself doesn’t mean that you can’t do more creative work after completing it.

Earlier this week, I procrastinated my two-hour morning writing session until two o’clock in the afternoon before finally committing to just 25 minutes of work. Tackling that tiny goal quieted the voice of fear in my head and filled me with a much-needed sense of ability. Without pushing myself, I went on to write for another 3.5 hours, penning nearly 3,500 words for Self-Publishing Simplified.

If it weren’t for my willingness to write small, I never would have written big. That said, there will be plenty of days when your tiny goal is all you can manage. Maybe you’ll only have enough mental focus for ten minutes of tough revision. But you might have additional energy for simpler creative work, and that’s okay! Go ahead and dive down that rabbit hole. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’ve given your top creative priority your best for the day, and that’s all you can ask of yourself.

Finally, remember that — no matter how small your steps — consistent action will always take you where you want to go. And by getting reasonable about what you can give to your writing each day, you’ll ensure that you always finish your writing sessions in the knowledge that you’re capable of fulfilling your writing dreams one great session at a time.

Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg

In this New York Times bestseller, a habit expert from Stanford University shares his breakthrough method for building habits quickly and easily.

Based on twenty years of research and Fogg’s experience coaching more than 40,000 people, Tiny Habits cracks the code of habit formation. With break-through discoveries in every chapter, you’ll learn the simplest proven ways to transform your life by feeling good about your successes rather than bad about your shortcomings. Hello, habits that stick!