I recently read The Business of Being a Writer by Jane Friedman, and I had to laugh when she said, “No one avoids writing like writers.” It’s funny because it’s true! We writers are great at putting off the actual task of writing. Natalie Goldberg echoes this in Writing Down the Bones: “Writing is so simple, basic, and austere. There are no fancy gadgets to make it more attractive. Our monkey minds would much rather discuss our resistances with a friend at a lovely restaurant or go to a therapist to work out our writing blocks. We like to complicate simple tasks.”
Almost every time I sit down to write, I feel this resistance within myself. Suddenly, it seems terribly important to catch up on social media or put a load of laundry into the washer. Or I distract myself by deciding that I don’t know enough about a subject—I need to read another book or article first, or I need to conduct extensive research into a small and rather insignificant part of my character’s personality or time period. Even though you know that writing is important to you, it can somehow be incredibly hard to do.
Goldberg compares writing to running, saying, “Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration to happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it.”
It’s one thing to read Goldberg and know that she’s absolutely right—that when it’s hard to write (which, for many of us, might be every time), we need to simply cut through all the nonsense that our monkey minds throw our way and just do it. But I never got this concept quite so thoroughly until I heard a phrase at a writing conference years ago:
Butt in chair, hands on keyboard.
Or, for short, BICHOK.
My writing life instantly changed.
Because that’s all that writing requires. And sometimes I think we forget it.
We think we need degrees or certifications or to join another critique group. We think we need more books and podcasts about writing. We think we need to go to a writer’s retreat or have a special, well-designed office with just the right amount of sunlight and a pretty view and an ergonomic chair. We think we need to wait for our writer’s block to go away. We think we need a whole day free from distractions.
Don’t get me wrong, all these things are awesome. They can help us progress and improve. But sometimes, these things can stand in the way of actually getting down to writing. At the end of the day, all we really need is to sit down, open up a blank page, and start typing. It's the best writing advice I've ever received.
As I pondered the idea of BICHOK recently, I was reminded of one of the principles from James Clear’s Atomic Habits: The Two-Minute Rule. This rule is simple: “when you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” Clear refers to these two-minute habits as “gateway habits”—a small and simple action that “naturally leads you down a more productive path.”
In our running example, a gateway habit might be to put on your tennis shoes. This one small action makes it much more likely that we will get outside for that run. For writing, a gateway habit can be as simple as sitting down with our computer and putting our hands on the keyboard. Once we’ve done this, we will be much more likely to buckle down and actually start writing.
“The point,” Clear says, “Is to master the habit of showing up.” And that is what BICHOK is all about: showing up to writing practice, even if it’s the last thing you feel like doing, even if there are emails to answer or chores to be done, even if your brain feels empty and numb.
When we show up regularly—when we put our butt in the chair and our hands on the keyboard—keeping up a consistent writing practice slowly begins to get easier. “If you run regularly,” Goldberg says, “you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time.” The same can be said of writing. It can be the hardest thing in the world to start, but once we complete our gateway habit of BICHOK, all our excuses start to fall away.
If you’ve made a goal to write every day, but it’s the end of the day and you’re tired? Butt in chair, hands on keyboard. If you hit a major roadblock and your plot grinds to a stop? Butt in chair, hands on keyboard. If it’s the last week of NaNoWriMo and you’re sick of your manuscript and you want to delete the whole thing this instant? Butt in chair, hands on keyboard.
Guess what? I didn’t want to write this article. But I did it anyway.
Butt in chair, hands on keyboard.
Years later, it’s still the best writing advice I’ve ever received.
It works.
Happy writing!