by James Dowd
This self-control is important because when overwhelmed with options (like the endless nature of the internet), we tend to regret our decisions later, obsess over foregone alternatives, continuously find new distractions, and constantly go back and fix what doesn’t need to be fixed The result is that we tweak and overthink our writing forever, and never ship it or share it with anyone. Instead of accepting that right now you need to be editing, you start daydreaming and thinking up new options. Instead of accepting where you’re at, you’re consistently going backwards and overthinking things you’ve already thought about. But, you’re not doing this because it needs to be overthought, you’re doing it because moving forward into the unknown is scary. And, all of the Braindumping, notes, thoughts, and ideas look like a lot of work, and that’s even scarier. You’re allowing your lack of structure and focus to derail you from finishing your writing. Remember, done is better than perfect, so keep your eyes ahead and edit what you have toward completion. Simplify, simplify.
Research actually shows that the more 401(k) plans people are presented, the less likely they are to sign up for any at all. Similarly, when faced with an abundance of stock investment choices, they avoid the market altogether. With too many options, we become paralyzed. The same is true for the writing process. When you can do anything, you do nothing. So, simplify and focus. Avoid having to make countless decisions. Give yourself structure and a simple task to accomplish. Ask yourself, “What am I doing right now?” Then do that one thing only.
“I am researching”
“I am explaining things to myself like I’m an idiot.”
“I’m Braindumping my flow of consciousness.”
“I am listing random things.”
“I am editing and consolidating my research into something manageable and structured.”
“I am re-reading for flow, context, and content.”
“I am now proofing.”
All of these make up the writing process, but are simpler, focused, digestible steps that help eliminate the great fear that comes when you consider all of the options, decisions, and possibilities that come with crafting words. You’re not doing many things; you’re doing one thing. You’re not editing while writing, and vice versa. You’re allowing your Head to control your Heart, which sometimes needs to be done. And, along the way, you’ll discover simple solutions to complex challenges. When you’ve done it, you’ll tell yourself that it can’t be this easy, that you didn’t actually write anything, but that’s exactly the sort of focus and flow you’re looking to achieve in your work. Don’t overthink it.
Dumb Writing Tip #23: Stop chewing things over.
I can see you, sitting in front of your computer, thinking, not writing. You’re letting words and ideas float around your head in endless circles. It’s exhausting, for both of us. And, fun fact: this loop of thoughts that keep you from writing can actually lead to anxiety and depression. In the world of mental health, it’s called Writer’s Rumination, named for the “chewing over” of thoughts, much like how a cow consumes its food — chew, swallow, regurgitate, and chew again, just like your ideas.
This rumination process burns time, energy, and contentment, leading a Writer to focus more on the possible negative outcomes: “What if I don’t finish? What if I never get there? What if no one likes it?”
It’s inevitable, but there’s something you have to remember: you can’t truly control your writing, especially when you need the writing gods to breathe inspiration into you. And, you can’t control time or another person’s reaction to your work. What you can control is your own mind. You can stop it from getting stuck trying to predict the unpredictable, or control the uncontrollable.
Writing with Head is about controlling your own mind. It’s about reminding yourself that you’re in charge, that the work will get done, that the ideas you have already are enough to move forward. Writing with Head and, more-so, writing dumb are about limiting fear, stress, and anxiety, all which stem from rumination.
So, keep your eyes on the page, trust in your Heartfelt Braindumpings, and do not try to predict the outcome. You are here, and this is the path forward.
Dumb Writing Tip #24: Support yourself.
This writing tip is in no way dumb, and yet I feel dumb every time I use it, most likely because I’m worrying too much about what others think of me and my writing process. It’s is a technique to keep you focused on your world, to eliminate negative rumination, and to infuse small amounts of motivation and inspiration through words. It’s to surround yourself with post-its and other notes that inspire and support you. Literally surround yourself with words to allow yourself to live, temporarily, in a world of words where you feel safe, comfortable, and inspired. If you aren’t feeling confident, put confidence-building messages around you, like “You are the best writer at this desk.” It’s true, isn’t it? If you’re struggling to write in a voice or style, put examples around you that represent that style, like romantic, flowing poetry if that’s what you’re working on, or teen slang if that’s your audience and voice, or both when writing romantic poetry for teens. I once even kept the worst headline I ever saw smack-dab in front of me to remind myself that, at the very least, I won’t write the worst headline in history.
Whatever will help you in any way, rely on those words. Create the environment that best supports you as a Writer.
Editing Your Dump
“I’m not a good writer. I’m a good editor.”
— Jason Rose
So, now you’ve got this big ol’ Dump of writing that is ugly and seemingly meaningless, now what? Answer: You finally turn it into something useful.
The Braindump is a shotgun approach to writing — a massive untargeted projection of all the possibilities that you could consider. The edit process of this method is to recognize all of the puzzle pieces you have laid out before you, and you begin carefully putting them into place. It’s where you begin to see your intended work finally take form. A Braindump could be a song, a novel, a movie — or all of the above. It all depends on how you shape it. You don’t write a movie; you write a story. You just edit it into a movie during this stage of writing — you give it acts and screenplay formatting. The same can be said for an email — you give it a greeting and a question or call to action. In both cases, and anything you might be writing, you have rationale intention (yours, a character’s, the reader’s, and all of the above), as well as elements of Heartfelt personality and emotion. With all of that, you want to create a resulting thought, emotion, or action in the reader — to think, feel, or do. In your writing, regardless of its medium, you want to communicate through story and language in a way that incites something in someone. You want to take them on a brief journey with your words, feeling a connection across space, time, and pixels. All of this truly happens here, in the edit. Remember: there’s no difference between writing a movie and an email, except the time and structure you provide it. At the core of anything is intention.
Oftentimes, when I’m at this stage of the writing process, someone will ask to read my first draft. The challenge is that I generally consider the Dump and all subsequent forms of it through this process to be my first draft, and rarely are they friendly to other people’s eyeballs, but that’s ok. The Dump was for the Writer, and so is this. It’s all still a vast collection of all of your ideas and intentions, and once filled, you and you alone will start to feel the flow of what it will become. Obviously, no one else would be able to, but it’s for you, not them, anyways. So, tell them to shut up and wait — you’re writing!
However, even though this is your first draft, do not use your Braindump as the place you’re actually writing the final piece. The Braindump is sacred and should exist even after you’re done with it. This is so you can go back to reference the Dump, or to get more information — a helpful link, quote, or thought. If you try writing in the Dump itself, you will start overwriting everything you’ve done up to this point. You will lose valuable ideas an
d research in an effort to begin cleaning up and finalizing. If, in an editing frenzy, you chop something from your Dump, it’s an idea lost forever, and now is no time to be thinking of fresh ideas — you need to focus on moving forward. To lose all those wild, imaginative thoughts from before would be simply wasteful. That’s why it’s time to expand your Dump into multiple forms. Copy & paste, duplicate, create the same thing many times. Each Dump will serve a purpose. Be comfortable having many tabs and drafts open at once. Be ready to confuse yourself around which one is which, but remember that it’s better to have multiple drafts than to lose the work you’ve already done by deleting something now that might be useful later.
Separating your Dump into multiple forms allows you to better process all that crap you collected. If done right, your OG Dump is likely many pages long, with different fonts and colors, creating a colorful mess that would be difficult for anyone else but you to digest. And now, you have to dive in and start figuring out what your idiot Heart came up with. You have to start wading through the excess, pulling out the gems and piecing together bits of writing that are already complete.
To begin your edit, remember to always have a true Dump that remains intact — you never edit in here — and then move everything to another edit document where you can work from. This is not even your final draft document. You’ll want one more where final words will end up. That’s one Dump, transformed into three documents. Annoying, but worth it.
At this point in your journey, you have:
Your Dump: everything goes in, nothing comes out.
Your Edit: where you arrange thoughts into sections. Copy and paste everything associated with what you’re focusing on in that moment here. When it’s a nice cohesive thought, you move it to…
Your Draft: where you drop clean, crisp, finalized writing after it’s processed through the Edit.
Working in the Edit
The second document, the Edit, is a vital component to the writing process because it allows you to stage and process information as it moves between the creative Braindump stage and the final drafting.
With an editable version of your Dump here in this document, you can begin trimming excess — deleting things you’ve collected but are no longer relevant. These might be quotes, stats, ideas, or just mindless ramblings, but at this point, you may feel that you don’t need them anymore. By deleting them from the Edit, you can start to simplify and focus your Dump in order to get closer to done. Plus, by having the first Dump intact, you can delete from the Edit freely, knowing you can easily retrieve those words again, if needed.
As you delete from the Edit, you can also begin moving things around. You’ll notice similar thoughts and ideas, and how they support one another or build upon each other. For a movie, it might be things that go in the same scene, or act, or maybe it’s elements of a character that once grouped together, you’re better able to reference who they are as you write their scenes. For a school paper, it might be the same arguments for comparing and contrasting. All of these comparable elements you can move around in your Edit to be closer together. This allows you to start bucketing information in a way that begins to resemble your intended written piece. Also, feel free to start naming these buckets or describing them, whether at the beginning in bold or as a comment. It helps to process lots of information when you know what big blocks information are, roughly.
Example:
“This is the introduction, because it explains what I’m writing without too much explanation, because I want people to still read the damn thing.”
“This is my first half of the book, all about Heart, and here are all the things that support it, like Writing With Blood”
“This is the second half of the book, all about Head, and here are all the tips on structure and style — the boring shit.”
“This is a bunch of random stuff, which I don’t know what to do with, I’ll force them in later and hopefully no one will notice it’s out of place.”
Regardless of what it will end up being, by bucketing, you may begin to see the structure and shape take form. You might begin to notice Dump elements that resemble an introduction, or specific chapters, or a great way to close things out later.
Throughout this, you’re not writing, you’re editing, and you’ll find that your brain is far more comfortable doing that — there’s less pressure. There is also far less confidence needed in cleaning up writing, as opposed to birthing it from nothing. You’re no longer fighting in an arena, you’re simply arm-chair quarterbacking from home. Just think about how easy it is for others to comment, edit, and shit all over your writing. Everyone has opinions, but not always fresh ideas, and this stage of the writing process is utilizing that opinion to craft all of the ideas you’ve collected in the Dump. Plus, it’s a calming feeling to know that this thing you’re writing is there, right there, in the notes. The hard work has already been done. This is the easy part. It’s all in there. You only have to carve and chisel away the excess to find it, like a sculptor who sees the statue in the block of marble.
Remember not to fall back into the Heart stage, unless you plan on staying there. Your brain cannot quickly shift between the two, so if you feel a creative pull back toward the Dump, allow yourself time to play there, but make it clear to yourself that that’s where you are. And, if you do switch, create rituals or experiences that reset your mind. Go for a walk, chat with someone, grab a coffee — each allows you to take a few moments to step away from the writing so that when you return you can set a new course for yourself or return to where you were when you were finding yourself straying.
As you edit, with bits and pieces of Braindumpings now coming together, you’ll find incomplete half-thoughts and gaps between. Let them exist in their buckets without connecting them until you’ve fully processed the Dump. You’ll want to go all the way through multiple times, deleting what’s not useful, bucketing what is, all the while pushing excess down below. You’ll quickly notice a clear divide happening: good content rising to the top and bad content falling down below.
Though bad and seemingly useless right now, do not delete the content down below. This might be useful later. Instead, recognizing that the stuff at the top is the best stuff, give it order. Whatever you’re writing, it needs structure. The top of your Edit is now your outline, in which the form you want the piece to take is laid out so that everything that remains can simply be placed into the right spot. If it’s a movie script, you might have your Inciting Incident and Turning Point. If it’s an article, you might have your Lead and use of the Inverted Pyramid becoming clear with the most important information near the top. If it’s an advertisement, you might have your Headline, Subhead, Body, and Tag. If it’s a website, you have all the different sections or components. Whatever your form, you can certainly find a template online, and then you can copy & paste the good content right into it. Always remember though: a template is a guideline but certainly not a rule. Break the template where you see fit, follow the path you want to take. Otherwise, your template will guide you to something that feels repetitive or overly “cookie-cutter.”
Regardless of medium-inspired structure or form, no matter what you’re writing, you’re telling a story, and storytelling is simple. It’s a strange science that — regardless of medium or form — engages and manipulates the human mind. We’re born with that gift. It’s innate, developed over millennia of human evolution, so trust in your storytelling abilities. But know, despite what many would tell you, your story is not guided by needing a beginning, middle, and end. That’s merely a gross oversimplification provided by those who want to sound like they know what they’re talking about, and it’s a concept that offers no value to you, the storyteller. Your beginning is merely where you decide to begin, and your end is when you’re done telling your story, and everything in between is the middle, so obviously there’s a beginning, middle, and end. What does it offer? Using a guideline of “beginning, middle, and end” is like saying the
winning team in a hockey game is the one with more goals when time runs out — it’s ridiculously obvious and therefore beyond dumb to say out loud. We’re writing dumb, but we’re not that dumb.
Storytelling is simply choosing a destination, where your story ends, but more than that, it’s crafting a journey that’s actually worth taking all the way to the end — whether it’s a movie or that email you’re writing. We’re storytelling beasts, yet most of the stories we tell each other throughout the day are akin to something like this…
”I was parking but couldn’t find a spot. Just when I thought I found one, I started turning in, and a motorcycle was in the spot already.”
Sure, it’s got a twist ending, but as a story, it really sucks. It also has a beginning, middle, and end, but who the hell cares?
“I was driving down the highway when suddenly a car cut me off.”
Bad story, but you’ve probably told something like it recently. Your mind is desperate to share your experiences. It just needs help making it interesting and worth telling. So, instead of using the “beginning, middle, and end” template, use this one to tell your stories: