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At the start of a new year, many people resolve to change behaviours and achieve goals: get healthy, stop eating so much chocolate, write more. But there’s an alternative movement promoting yearly themes. This video by CGP Grey is a great explainer.
This year, my theme is ‘enjoy’. Building on my earlier thoughts about what makes writing pleasurable, I intend to ask myself how I am making this activity (writing, reading, parenting…) more enjoyable. For example, I often struggle to write. But it’s not the actual crafting of ideas that I don’t like; it’s the blank screen with the flashing cursor. So I’m going to experiment with delaying that moment for as long as possible. Importantly, this doesn’t mean delaying writing, which was my previous approach. Instead, I’m going to write in more enjoyable ways: noting ideas on paper, working on outlines using mind maps in Mind Node, and writing long-hand in my Supernote e-ink tablet. Then, once it feels as easy as possible, I’ll type my words. Thinking about enjoyment makes my problem much more specific: it’s not that I don’t enjoy writing, it’s that I don’t enjoy typing when I don’t know exactly what I’m going to type.
And, in writing this post I’ve discovered that Helen Sword, whose earlier book inspired me to think more carefully about what I liked doing when writing, has written a book on finding pleasure in writing that will be released later this year — definitely looking forward to this reading this one!
