Get cracking, keep cracking on

Katie Grant

Is the following experience familiar to you? During the night, or while cooking or walking or working on something else, you know exactly how to continue your work-in-progress (WiP). But when you sit down, all prepared and ready, and open up the WiP, you freeze. When I admit to this problem at workshops for undergraduates, postgraduates or staff, I’m always surprised by how many participants think it’s an issue peculiar to them, and that better preparation is the answer. Clearly, it’s a shared problem, and over the years, I’ve found that it’s not better preparation but different preparation that’s the answer.

For most activities, from going on holiday to going to bed, preparation helps. Writing is different. Preparation – making the coffee, opening the laptop, angling the light, setting out materials – can do the opposite. To use a diving analogy, prep can be like slowly climbing the steps to the high board and shuffling along, pretending you’re gearing up to dive in, when actually, the only way you’ll manage the dive is to run up the steps and pitch directly over.

Writing preparation can be that slow climb up those diving-board steps. We kid ourselves that each step is necessary. We have our routine, and who hasn’t made an entire morning disappear writing emails we ‘must’ answer before we get cracking on our own writing? Well, I suggest a new way that works when I practise it myself. Firstly, don’t think about preparation, still less about ‘settling down’ to write. Don’t even sit down. At the time you’ve designated for writing, open your laptop, turn off the Wifi, bring up the WiP, then go for a brisk walk and when you return, without taking your coat off, lean over your chair and start typing.

Just as it doesn’t matter if that first practice dive isn’t perfect, it doesn’t matter if your first typing isn’t great. The point of this typing is to break the freeze before it’s had time to solidify. If you find it hard to type without thought, try leaving sentences in the WiP unfinished so when you lean over the chair, you’ve got something to start on. Once you’ve started, you’ll be on your way. On a good day, you may find it’s an hour or so before you’ve taken off your coat, and when you finally do make coffee, you’ve earned it.