If anyone ever asked me that tried and tired question: “What are your hobbies?”, I’d chirp: “Writing!” I would go on about how I loved to write fiction, sometimes poetry, and about how I was writing a novella. The interrogator would look suitably impressed and I would launch into stories about the creative writing program at Stanford that I had experienced and loved, the classes I had taken, and the writers I had worked with: Elizabeth Tallent, Tobias Wolff, Adam Johnson, Stephen Elliott, and most famously, the Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee.
But cocktail party small talk later, I always felt sheepish and small. The truth was, I hadn’t written anything substantial in years. I would whip myself up into writing frenzies every now and then, and birth new stories in fits and starts. I had a graveyard of one paragraph story beginnings saved on my hard drive. I would read about writers and writing online, sigh over the delicious prospect of a writing career, muster up muses and my enthusiasm, dust off my dreams, and begin – again, and again.
But unfettered by the finality of class deadlines, I would halt a couple paragraphs into the story, mainly because I couldn’t figure out where it was going. I always found interesting beginnings easier to write than developing further plotlines. But after the first rush of the fresh start died down and the dopamine levels dipped in my brain, I couldn’t bring myself to show up day and day to the reality of the blank page. Simply put, I just couldn’t bring myself to develop a writing habit.
I’ve written before about how perfectionism is paralyzing and even here, it was no different. I soon realized that my brain had tricked me into believing that every word I wrote had to be a pearl, every sentence a glittering necklace of priceless gems. As my brain scrambled and often failed to find the absolute perfect adjective or turn of phrase or a fascinating plotline, at the very moment I faced the tyranny of the blank page, it eventually gave up on itself. Nothing I could write was as good as I imagined it should be, and so when the intoxication of being a “writer” wore off and sobriety hit, I simply wrote nothing, and the lengthy hiatus from writing since college stretched out even longer over the years.
What turned the tide for me was a TED talk I listened to on one of my daily walks during the pandemic. While my work (our family business manufacturing disinfectants, a Covid-positive enterprise) kept me busy all day, I needed something else to do to rejuvenate and flirted again with the idea of taking up writing as a distraction. I would have charted the same path I had tread so many times already were it now for a chance encounter with Christine Carter's TED talk on "The 1-minute secret to forming a new habit". Being a planner by nature, she launched her daily running practice (end goal being a marathon) with a detailed running plan that she followed for a grand total of a week before perfectionism got the best of her. Finally, she came up with an ingenious plan to get around it: she convinced herself that she just needed to run for just one minute a day. After her minute, she could run, if she felt like it, but if she didn’t, she got a free pass.
This time, starting up didn’t take a whole lot of effort: after all, who can say no to just one minutes? This idea isn’t new: scores of others, including the best-selling blogger and author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, have long touted the benefits of starting a new habit with a minuscule time commitment - in his case, the two minute rule. But this was the first time it really hit home for me. That night, when I spoke to my old friend Louis Jackson, a yoga practitioner and closet writer, we made a pact: we would write for just two minutes a day, every day, and keep each other accountable. And because I know that I am driven by todo lists, I promptly added a recurring daily task in my Todoist: “My 2 min writing practice.”
Since March 2021, I have written for two minutes every single day, except for the week in which I delivered and brought home my second child. Before the delivery, I had told Louis, “I’ll be stopping for awhile,” to which he replied, “You get a pass; you have one of the most legitimate excuses possible.” But while I thought I wouldn’t be able to emerge from the fog of sleepless nights in the early days of nursing a newborn, I found myself, a couple of weeks into her life, wanting to fill those empty hours with some writing. I had finally developed a writing habit.
Most of what I wrote up till the delivery read like journal entries: an account of my daily journey through the second half of my pregnancy, a chronicle of the highs and lows of 2021, but that didn’t matter. I was writing about what I knew, which was undoubtedly the best way to start. Much of it was unusable in a real essay or work of fiction, but that didn’t matter either because I was just dabbling. By codifying this as ‘practice,’ I kept my standards low, so I didn’t have to be perfect. I could just be myself. After all, I was my only reader.
When I stopped expecting greatness from myself, and took the pressure off, how I produced! While two minutes was a tiny amount of time on a daily basis, I found, to my surprise, that as my sentences spilled out, they piled up into a solid, hefty little mountain, into something substantial: specifically, about 25,000 words over the course of four months. And the more chaff I collected on my pages, the more actual wheat I found within it. Simply put, the more I practiced, the deeper I got into my groove and the more I liked what I wrote. I had gotten out of my own way and found my voice.
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