In “
How Writers Journey to Comfort and Fluency: A Psychological Adventure,” Robert Boice examines productive writers and concludes that one key to their success is what he describes as “brief, daily sessions" (BDS). (See my
comment about the book's price.)
The “BDS” principle is so crucial that Boice makes it one of his cardinal rules for writing productivity, one with special significance as we head into the long Memorial Day weekend:
“Learn to accept the planned outputs of brief, daily sessions as all the writing you need or want to do for the day: Being able to enjoy evenings, weekends and vacations without supposing you should be writing is an essential pleasure.”
Boice’s Rule #10 brings to mind a buzzword in business, finance and computing I’ve been hearing a lot lately: granularity. It means many separate components constitute a system; the greater the granularity of a proposal, deal or computer processor, the greater the flexibility.
For writers,
granularity can serve as an approach to successfully breaking up writing projects, from deadline stories to more ambitious projects such as essays, articles and books, into multiple and manageable tasks, literary grains of sand, if you will.
Otherwise, you may end up buried by the mountain of sand you think you have to climb.
Ever feel this way? I certainly did this week. I’d agreed to an editor’s 10-day plan to produce 20 segments for a book I’m revising. At the time, it sounded perfectly reasonable. So why did I put it off? It sounded like a good idea at the time. So why did I let two weeks go by before I sent a sheepish e-mail to my editor?
“The only thing that seems to work for me is a series of small steps,” I wrote. “My newsroom experience has made me very fast with an imminent deadline. I think I was thrown by the suggestion to do two sections a day for 10 days. I'm not sure why. The numbers overwhelmed me, especially since I feel a certain amount of uncertainty/unfamiliarity" with the subjects at hand.
My editor, a good soul, didn’t bother responding by e-mail; she heard my cry for help; my cell phone rang. We decided to cut back to one segment a day.
That was five days — and five new segments — ago. I feel more
in control of my time and my writing. The daily task is the first writing I do every day. I know from years of painful experience that putting deadlines off not only clouds my day with guilt, it also increases the chance the day will pass without the writing getting done.
Following Boice’s Rule # 10, I've come to see the power of brief, daily sessions as a replacement for my long-time habit of binge writing that leaves me wiped — and bummed -- out.
For journalists, this approach might seem ludicrous. Imagine: “Sorry, Boss, I won’t have that story today. I’ve done my brief, daily session, and I need a few more.”
But consider
the multiple tasks that a story demands. How often have we put off interviews, or planning a story, writing and revising a draft? Then we wait until the clock leaves no options except jamming it all into several hours of manic effort. Instead, we could have spread out the tasks into
granular bits. The same holds true, I’m finding, for long-term writing projects.
Instead of viewing stories as mountains to be scaled, I want to try to see them as mounds of sand, ones built grain by grain.
I hope it can work for you, too.
I'll be taking Monday, May 28, off in observance of Memorial Day. Count on my next post Wednesday, the 30th. Have a great weekend.
Steven and others, My apologies. i should have indicated that...
