Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

Although we might not wish to admit it, we are all creatures of habit. Some habits are obvious, and serve a necessary evolutionary function, like sleeping at night. Even in an age where the world is never truly asleep, most of us tend to sleep at night and work during the day. Biologically, we're optimized for this behavior. Our eyes really function best with full daylight, at night we tend to lose at least some of our depth perception and our color vision. Plus, at one point in our evolution, the night was home to a lot of hungry predators with excellent night vision. Our bodies have developed to make the most of this habit, by using the hours between dusk and midnight to do the majority of the cellular upkeep and repair needed, provided we've been good kids and gone to bed.

The word habit has become fairly negative. Most discussions of habits involve the ones we'd like to change: eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, etc. A habit isnt' necessarily a bad thing, in many cases we need our habits to simply get us through our complicated lives. In the simplest terms, a habit is a conditioned response to a set of stimuli. Those stimuli can be internal, like eating in response to feeling bored, or external, like feeling hunger when you see a certain restaurant logo. B.F. Skinner wrote a ton of interesting non-fiction material about conditioning in rats, that is still heavily in use today.

Fortunately, we aren't rats.

The rats had no choice over what habits they would acquire, I doubt anyone thought to ask them. People, on the other hand, can actually choose to condition themselves. I'm not saying it is easy, just simple. 

Let's say that you want to be a writer, but you are struggling with daily word count. You know you need to sit at the computer and just write, but a million things get in your way. What you need is a new habit, and to break a few old ones. The generally accepted rule is that it takes just seven days to form a new habit, but thirty days change an old one, so give yourself plenty of time, and patience.

Naturally, it is best to start your new project in a time and place where you can be undisturbed. Allow yourself five minutes before writing to do whatever you feel you need to before you start. Grab that drink, turn on the fan, go to the restroom, because when that five minutes is up, you're done. To take advantage of the fact that new habits take less time to establish, consider writing in a different location, with different music, or even changing the wallpaper on your laptop. All these things are stimuli, and they clue your brain in that something has changed.

Now, write. Either pick an amount of time, or a word count, and let nothing interrupt you until it is done. It may be best to start at about a quarter of what you wish to eventually accomplish, to ease into it. Once you are done, immediately reward yourself. Do something small that makes you feel good. That reward reinforces the behavior you are trying to turn into a habit. Repeat this every day for a week, and you will begin to feel a certain readiness to write at the appointed time. In the second week, increase to half the desired time or word count, and so on through the end of the month.

After 30 days, you should be the proud owner of a shiny new writing habit, as well as quite a bit of accumulated material. It isn't easy, but if you really want to write (or whatever) it will get help you get the job done.

Cheers,

Michelle