Sam Gentle.com

Rebreathing

I heard some interesting advice recently: if you're writing something and you get stuck, just retype your previous sentence or paragraph. Doing so puts you in the frame of mind of writing (rather than thinking about writing) and pulls all those associations into your near orbit. When you catch back up to where you were before, it'll be much easier to just keep rolling along into the next sentence. I think this technique is fascinating, and gives rise to a whole space of similar tools.

One of the trickiest things about doing creative work is getting yourself into the right state for it. If you're thinking about something totally different, it can be difficult to build the associations necessary to get into a nice easy groove. I've previously tried to do things like look at interesting work made by others, or go back through old projects of my own, but never found it particularly effective. Thinking about it now, the reason seems obvious: being on the stage vs being in the audience are very different processes. It'll help a little because you have those associations between consuming the thing and creating it, but ideally it'd be nice to have something more direct.

The answer is to think about output rather than input. To get yourself in a place where it's easy to do things, the solution is to do things. Unfortunately, doing things when you're not already doing them is difficult (otherwise you wouldn't have this problem in the first place). In other words, you need a starter motor, something that's easier to get going than the actual work, but as similar to it as possible so you can transition straight to the real thing when you're ready. This technique ticks all of those boxes.

I think of it as rebreathing, like the SCUBA technology where you reuse your exhaled air. Of course, any kind of practice or warmup activity has a similar function, but rebreathing uses a unique and clever approach to make sure that the warmup is similar to the real activity: just use a real activity that you have done before. And by designing it so that the activity ends where your next task begins, you can make the best use of that built up momentum.