Day 24
Writing is a skill. In here, I send notes of my writing from the 50 days of writing course by David Perell, to reflect, develop and build my writing style.
In the 24th email from the 50 days of writing course, David Perell discusses about what must be done to have a better writing session. In exact words, How long does it take you to get into a flow state?
Everybody goes through the same process of writing but why are some getting better results and some don't. In this email, David takes us in on a little secret tunnel to let us all know the secret. He mentions -
Every writing process begins at the bottom of the Mountain of Agony. Depending on the day, it can take minutes or hours to traverse it. The climb is grueling because you can’t gain momentum until you reload the essay’s context into your brain and decide what you need to do next. In procrastination, you check Twitter, then your texts, then email. The more uncertain you are about what to do, the harder the climb will be and the longer it‘ll take to find your flow state on the Skyway of Satisfaction.
After writing for the required time, David metaphorically explains that the skyway of satisfaction ends and you'll find a parking lot.
My thoughts:
In this email, David uncovers an important habit that can separate you from the rest of the people who are writing as well. I think I am starting to understand few things to reflect upon later on.
Writing also requires warming up:
Everybody ( including me) assumes that when we sit to write down, writing automatically happens. That is always not the case. Writing requires a warm up just as exercising.
This way you get to set the boundaries for what you will be writing and how will it look overall.
Warming up also requires to have notes to look back and take insights from. I have covered more about note-taking in the ongoing notes from 50 days of writings which you can check out.
Above David, the process of writing starts with a lot of agony and then to traverse and write for the day is really hard if you don't have the following already available -
Once you are able to create these for yourselves. You will be in a path called 'Skyway to satisfaction', which is you finding effortless focus. It is what you call the 'In the zone'.
There is also a small amount of work that will need to be done after you are done writing for the day, which is what David mentions as the parking lot after a Skyway of satisfaction.
It is when people are happy about the process that you put in today and get on with other works of the day.
In the parking lot, we must be writing a summary for ourselves. These don't have to be long, it just takes 5 minutes to complete but will give you an edge on what must be done tomorrow.
You need to write only three things:
- Where they’re stuck,
- What they plan to achieve next time,
- and what they were thinking about when they stopped writing.
By doing this you will be eliminating most of the stress before starting out the next day before your writing out.
This is what warming up will happen, but it happens the day before not before starting to write.
Thank you for reading.
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