The Fifteen Minute Creative

So I had some bad health news last weekend. An illness I thought I'd gotten over is back and resisting treatment. It's progressive, which means that I don't feel terrific, but I'm not feeling terrible just yet.  I'm hopeful that my doctors can find the right treatment before I get too sick. Of course, it is difficult to work when you aren't feeling well.  It's also wonderful to have something to work on, because it helps me take my mind off the pain and fear.  Being sick is no fun. Being chronically ill is difficult to accept on the best days--impossible to face on the worst ones. So I've lost a few days on the blog to feeling (embarrassingly) sorry for myself.  The thing is, I've still been writing. Partly because I'm in the middle of working on something I love, and partly because I crave the distraction and the sense of progress that the writing offers.  I read a wonderful quote about genius in the introduction to a book I'm just beginning...

I don't know about you, but I often come to my work with big expectations. When I draft something new, I always begin with high hopes.  How high? Probably too high, if I'm being honest. I can feel this in my current work. I recently finished a revision on a piece and I can't get over how let down I was by the ending. In my head, the end left the reader with a punch. But on the page...not so much. Not so much yet , that is, because I know that this won't be my final edit.  Ending a piece can be difficult. Sometimes, I'll write a draft and it will take me months (or even years) to find the ending. Sometimes, I need to end the story sooner. Sometimes, it needs a whole extra thing.  The point is, I can't fix the ending unless I am actually doing the writing, so agonizing in my head gets me nowhere. Or as the kids used to say, it's gets me nowhere but down. Of course, it's great to meet your own work with strong expectations. I'm not trying to spend all...

Today is my seventh day on this year-long journey of fifteen minutes. One full week of daily writing!  I know it is hard to assess anything after only a week. Making space for the fifteen minutes still feels effortful, and I have to be deliberate about making myself do it.  This morning, all I wanted was a little more sleep. (With a toddler, a pandemic winding down, a book to promote, and a part time job, I am So. Tired. All. The. Time. )  Still, I hoisted myself out of bed, made a cup of coffee, sat down at our kitchen island, and managed fifteen minutes of work before my daughter started crying.  I'm still pushing myself to form this new habit. The day when this new program becomes automatic is still ahead, somewhere in the future.  When will that be, exactly ?  I've seen numbers ranging from eighteen days to two hundred and fifty four (!).  James Clear, a bestselling author who writes exclusively about achievement and habits, says that the average ...

Whew! I don't know about you, but I had a rough weekend. For the last six months, my husband, daughter, and I have been mostly living in the mountains about four hours from home. Last weekend we had to move out, which meant cleaning the house, packing our things, and heading home in what turned out to be monstrous traffic. All that, plus trying to keep our toddler entertained turned out to be  busy . I did, however, manage to continue with my fifteen daily minutes, and today, as promised, I want to tackle the third part of the habit loop.  Part Three is the reward or final feedback. I thought a ton about this as I packed and organized and scrubbed and sorted...and organized and scrubbed and sorted some more. To change an action from a deliberate one into a habitual one, you need to give your brain a reward at the end of the action. This makes your brain light up (aka causes a dopamine surge).  This signals that the activity is pleasurable and makes your brain want to rep...

Day Three and things are going well!  Today, I'm thinking about the second step in the three step habit loop: doing the activity.  From what I can tell, research doesn't have a ton to say about this step. (We can get into flow states and solving creative puzzles later...there is a ton to think about there, but it isn't really part of habit formation.)  I will, however, share a tidbit of relevant wisdom from Hemmingway. He says you should stop for the day when you still know what will happen next . That way, you are still inside your work--even when you are not actively doing it--and you aren't feeling all blocked and pressured when you sit down next. Hemmingway poses with a black cat I do think that part of limiting yourself to fifteen minutes each day is that you stay, more or less, inside the work you are doing. Fifteen minutes is rarely enough to reach a big conclusion. So in theory, you should almost always have something to pick back up.  I'm going to be honest...

To get anything done, you need to have a habit of working on it.  When I was a professor, my research included work on motivation, learning, and achievement. After I left teaching, I thought I was going to never think about that work again, but it has been surprisingly helpful in thinking about my writing.  Knowing a thing or two about what makes people successful in a learning environment is actually helpful when you think about tackling a big project (aka writing a book).  Today, on Day Two, I wanted to spend a little time thinking about habits--how they are formed, how long it takes to form them, and how they can help us accomplish tasks. The best known popular book on habits is probably The Power of Habit by NYT business writer Charles Duhigg . He says that every  habit has the same three parts, that this three step process is neurological, and that the three parts in concert create automaticity. In other words, your brain follows a template which results in thi...