Beyond BICHOK: How, When and Why Getting Your Butt Out of the Chair Can Make You a Better Writer

From Jane Friedman:

You’re driving on a long stretch of highway when you have an insight about your main character’s childhood. Or you’re mid-hair-rinse in the shower, when you suddenly understand how to bring together the braided strands of your novel. Or you wake up at 2 a.m. with the resolution to that thorny plot issue you’ve been wrestling.

Have you ever noticed how many ideas arise when you’re not sitting at the keyboard? 

As writers, we’ve all experienced the law of diminishing returns—the point at which our writing stops being generative and begins to feel like we’re pulling each word from our synapses by hand. I spent the better part of a decade investigating how to create what I half-jokingly call a “law of increasing flow.” How might writers support our writing practice in a way that doesn’t leave us mentally burned out?

Conventional advice: butt in chair, hands on keyboard

For decades, writers have been told the most important thing to do is to put “butt in chair, hands on keyboard.” As acronyms emerged with USENET forums in the 1990s, this became abbreviated “BICHOK.”

BICHOK is essential to writing. You can’t publish a book without sitting down to write, to revise, to revise again (and again and again), to query, or to fill out your author questionnaire. Yet so often, it’s treated like a Puritan work ethic or a punishment: “You put your backside in that chair, young man, and don’t get up until you’ve written 10 pages.”

That may work for some writers, and if you’re among them, more power to you! That kind of disciplinarian approach, though, doesn’t work for me.

Putting hands on a keyboard doesn’t make someone a writer, any more than holding a Stratocaster makes someone a musician. There are many times when we can gain insight by looking away from our work. These include: Before we sit down to write, during the writing process, and between revisions. What we do during those times is every bit as important as getting the words down.

To understand how this helps your writing, it’s important to understand the interplay of the conscious and subconscious mind.

How the subconscious and conscious mind work

When I was younger, I used to tell people that my best writing bypassed my intellect entirely; it came from my heart and flowed down my arm. While that might sound precious and woo-woo, it turns out my instincts were right on. The intellect has many wonderful uses—categorizing and sorting (and revising, oh so much revising.)—but it’s a terrible writer.

The thinking mind informs our writing; it’s what allows us to conduct research, analyze information and execute the ideas we have. Original ideas, though, can only come up when we deliberately allow the mind to wander—and pay attention to its whereabouts.

The conscious or rational mind, including what we call the intellect, takes in about 2,000 bits of information per second. However, it can only process about 40 bits of information per second.

The subconscious mind, on the other hand, takes in upwards of 11 million bits of information per second. We know more than we are aware of knowing. The subconscious retains everything we’ve ever experienced. It combines seemingly disparate ideas and experiences and comes up with new and unusual connections. Just ask anyone who’s ever dreamt about their aunt Myrtle performing Riverdance in a T-Rex costume. The subconscious is creative.

Creativity comes from beyond the thinking mind

J.D. Salinger once wrote, “Novels grow in the dark.” By that, he meant that they emerge from the subconscious mind. In my experience, what we call intuition is logic of the subconscious, delivered to us in aha moments after it has had time to percolate.

Consider the old-fashioned tin coffeemaker, the kind you put on a stove. You add the ingredients—water in the bottom, coffee grounds on top—but you don’t expect coffee right away. The stove has to heat up; the water has to boil. Then it has to percolate, mixing the bubbling water with the grounds, as the water slowly takes on the flavor of the grounds. The process takes time and can’t be rushed. Creative percolation is the same.

Many of us get ideas from sudden insights, but waiting around for those is a fool’s errand, because there’s one major block: The thinking mind is as noisy as a jackhammer, whereas intuition whispers. As long as our thinking mind is engaged, it will be difficult to notice subconscious insights.

When we look away and we relax the thinking mind, we’re more receptive to our intuition.

. . . .

When to look away

Conventional writing advice suggests taking a break when you know what’s coming next. That presumes that only your writing time is productive and that all look-away time is unproductive.

But in Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, the late sci-fi author wrote: “As soon as things get difficult, I walk away. That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.” He clarifies by saying that when you move toward cats, they tend to move away, but if you ignore them, then they become interested.

Here are some of the ways I know it’s time for a break:

1. I’m zoning out
2. When words are sputtering out instead of flowing
3. I’m tab-hopping instead of writing
4. I’ve rewritten the same paragraph ten times
5. When anxiety is present and I believe the thought “I can’t possibly take a break, I’m too busy”

Paradoxically, when I believe that I can’t possibly take time away from writing, that’s when it’s most essential. That anxiety-to-panic isn’t doing my writing any favors. It’s a state of contraction, which is the opposite of expansive creativity.

If I work until the point where I feel completely depleted, it takes a much, much longer time to rebound than if I routinely top off my creative reservoir. It is so much easier to prevent burnout than to recover from it.

Aside from your personal creative rhythms—and each of us has our own—there are three main times when it’s important to take time away from the keyboard, with different recommendations for each.

1. Preparing to write (before you sit down)

In a hypnotherapy session, the therapist spends up to 75% of the time (or more) getting the client’s body to relax and their mind in a receptive state, so the suggestions can get through to the subconscious. The same principle applies to leveraging the subconscious in your writing. Making your mind a receptive environment for ideas to bubble up is essential to writing more, better and faster.

Novelist Haruki Murakami aims to put himself into a trance—a hypnotic state—through his daily routine. When he’s writing a novel, he gets up early, writes for a stretch of time and then goes for a long run and/or long swim. He’s in bed by 9 p.m. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing,” he’s quoted as saying. “It’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

The more time I spend getting into a quiet, aligned place, the more smoothly the words flow out. Generally speaking, my first drafts that come from a quiet place are far better and require less revision than those that I overthink from the beginning.

How to prepare: There’s an old joke about a student of Buddhism who asked his teacher how long he should meditate. “One hour every day,” replied the teacher. “I can’t do that!” the student replied. “I’m too busy!”

“Okay,” the teacher said. “For you, then, two hours.”

Many of us, especially those with full-time jobs and/or families, have limited writing time. “I don’t have time to look away!” I can hear you saying. For you, then, I say, take half your writing time and get grounded. Even if that’s 15 minutes out of 30 at 5 a.m. Just experiment with it.

If you want writing to flow through you, take time to quiet your mind first. Have the courage to be utterly unproductive. The quieter you can make your mind, the more space you’ve generated for new ideas to arise, and the more easily your writing will flow when you sit down at the keyboard.

Instead of trying and pushing and forcing, see if you can make the mental switch to allowing, receiving, flowing.

Play around with this idea of “relaxed but alert” and figure out what works for you. By learning to develop the observing circuit and purposely engaging that circuit alongside the daydreaming one, you will become more attuned to your deeper creativity.

2. Take regular daydreaming breaks while writing

In my experience, writer’s block comes from overthinking. Taking regular breaks—say, every hour to 90 minutes—can help clear up space in your thinking mind for the subconscious to bubble up original ideas and story solutions.

In Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, psychologist Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and journalist Carolyn Gregoire write, “Turning our attention away from the external world and tuning in to the world within—dreams, fantasies, stories, personal narratives and feelings—not only builds a sense of meaning and hope…but also allows us to tap into our deepest wellsprings of creativity.”

How to daydream for increased flow: The idea is to relax your mind and allow ideas to arise, rather than pushing and pushing and pushing. A few years ago, a client made a custom hula hoop for me. Trying to hula hoop without knocking down a plant or terrifying my cat invariably results in me laughing—and a complete pattern interrupt that creates more space for creativity to arise.

Let’s say you’ve been working on a pivotal scene where your main character faces her biggest fear. You’ve been hammering away at this scene for a while, and it doesn’t feel as though you’re making progress. Instead of doubling down and pushing harder, try stepping away and allowing, as Bradbury wrote, ideas to come to you. Don’t push your brain—creativity doesn’t respond to efforting; instead, try to relax your brain and let your mind wander.

These breaks don’t have to be long. According to Kaufman, even 15 minutes of shifting your focus—say, washing the dishes, doing some mindful stretching, or taking the dog out for a walk around the block—can relax the thinking mind enough for ideas to bubble up.

Often, I’ll print out a hard copy of an article-in-progress and go for a walk. After a bit, maybe 30 minutes, I’ll sit down and take one pass through the draft. I might spend 10 to 20 minutes making notes. Then I put it away and continue walking. Another half hour or so later, I’ll find another bench and sit down for another pass. I’m also a big fan of what I call “coffee shop edits”—taking a hard copy to a coffee shop and editing in a different environment.

Maya Angelou took this “different environment” idea even further: She rented a hotel room in her hometown by the month and wrote there in the mornings, then edited at home in the afternoon.

From a young age, Angelou also implicitly understood the difference between the conscious and subconscious minds. As she told the Daily Beast:

[My grandmother] used to talk about her “little mind.” So when I was young, from the time I was about 3 until 13, I decided that there was a Big Mind and a Little Mind. And the Big Mind would allow you to consider deep thoughts, but the Little Mind would occupy you, so you could not be distracted. It would work crossword puzzles or play Solitaire, while the Big Mind would delve deep into the subjects I wanted to write about.

Not everybody has the freedom to work this way, and this is my process; within the boundaries of your own life, you can find your own rhythms. The key to remember is this: The quieter you can make your mind, the more space you’re creating for ideas (and thorny plot situations) to resolve.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman