this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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I struggle with a lot of executive dysfunction, so please understand this within the context of trying other stuff to help you feel better in general. But practice and scheduling really do help. It can feel daunting to schedule too, but the important part is to train your brain to be ready and willing to do a behavior at a certain time or within a context. So for me, I have a time in the afternoon where I tend to be able to draw because I kept trying to do it around then. It's difficult to get it started, and I had to sometimes stare at a canvas for a while before scribbling some shit out and deleting it a few times before, eventually, I could stare for shorter, scribble out something, and then get interested enough to keep going and find that I was enjoying making something.
Sometimes building good habits is about tricking yourself into doing them until you like it. Maybe you can jot some of your notes down at night and go back the next day and just tell yourself you're going to read it again, and maybe fix a word or two. Or that you'll remember one key idea from the night and just write that down the next day and look at it for a while.
One more thing, give yourself permission to write trash. your drafts don't need to perform for anyone, not even yourself. The important thing is just to write.
In writing terms I am incapable of grinding through the unbearable, overly stiff cringe that comes out of me when I write during daylight hours. I know I can do a lot fucking better when there's not a fog descended over my brain. How do I make it so my brain does the 3am thing at 3pm instead? I have not written during the day and enjoyed it in a decade. At the point where I've backspaced more than twice I usually give up.
I absolutely refuse, when the shit I write now when the sun is out is hot garbage even compared to what I wrote in highschool, I will not. I do not need my non existent confidence crushed further by that.
I mean, if you refuse to write through the day, you won't write during the day, and you won't get better. You have to practice the things you want to improve. Yeah, it's gonna feel like shit, you're not gonna like what you produce at first, maybe for a long time. But it's not like you have to be good at it to start. Swallow your pride, accept that you have more refined taste than ability to perform during the time that you want to write, and focus on improving your ability to practice.
I went through this kind of thing when I decided draw more and more seriously last year. I had to make a lot of terrible gesture drawings, there was progress and regression, I fell off a lot, but slowly and surely, I improved - not just at drawing itself, but at doing it and feeling into it at times of day and in contexts where I would have just given up out of fear of not being able to perform previously.
There's a lot of things you might try to allow yourself to write things that aren't up to your standards for the purpose of keeping yourself doing it. I'm sure there are prompt generators in the same vein as pose libraries for gesture drawing. Try on awful styles of writing as a bit, tell yourself you're going to make the most purple prose you can bear, or stream of consciousness it. Again, the important thing I think, for our purposes, is that you are going through the processs of writing, that is: the typing, the rhythm of thought, the practice of letting yourself keep going even when you feel like you're not doing well. That's what you need to train to be able to write in the afternoon the same way you can in the small hours.