I’ve worked with many writers who have all but given up on their goals because they “just keep failing.” They sit down to try to write a book, but flame out halfway through. Or they’ve been trying to get their stories published for months, but no one is accepting them. These are all extremely common hardships most writers deal with. But how do you move past them and keep trying?
You know that advice you often hear about breaking big tasks into small pieces? It turns out it applies to writing, too — and it actually works.
Progress Is Easier to See When You Track Every Step
When you first start out as a writer — as you come to realize that writing is something you want to become a larger part of your life, rather than just a side hobby — everything you tend to think of as an “accomplishment” is big and, therefore, intimidating. You want to write a book. Get published in a literary journal. Get hired as a staff writer, or make a living as a freelance writer.
But when you only focus on these big achievements as wins, you’re going to win a lot less often. And that’s going to get really tiring, really fast. Our silly human brains like it when we win because it makes us feel good. The key to satisfying your silly mind muscle is to track achievements in small pieces, not just huge milestones.
Celebrating Tiny Victories Might Be the Push You Really Need
When I set out to draft a novel last year — for the first time in many years, which meant I was absolutely terrified — I knew that my ultimate goal was “finish writing first draft.” But if I’d only focused on that one finish line, I never would have actually finished the thing. Instead, I set a goal to write about 500 words each weekday. It was very small progress. But it was achievable. And 95 percent of the time, I achieved it. That’s what allowed me to write the whole book before the end of the year.
Each 500-word milestone — every time I got to check off that little box on my daily to-do list — felt like a much bigger victory than it was on paper. Instead of waiting until I finished the book to get that sweet, sweet dopamine hit, I gave myself a small dose every day. For me, that was more than enough to propel me forward every morning when I sat down to work on that book again. And again. And again.
There’s No Such Thing as Failing When You’re Always Winning
It’s pretty safe to assume that most writers are afraid to fail. It was scary for me to think about how disappointed I’d have been in myself if I started a book but never finished it. But I “won” every single weekday because I set out to write a small amount, and oftentimes I ended up writing more than I’d planned.
Even if I’d stopped writing before I finished my book, it would have been a lot easier to file that experience away as a victory rather than a failure. I may not have written a whole book, but there would have been many days I wrote 500 words or more. That’s more than most aspiring writers can say they’ve done!
Small progress is still progress. And if you can trick your brain into believing you’re winning, little by little, hey — you might actually accomplish the thing you’ve been trying to do all along.
Meg Dowell Writes 