Don’t Overthink It

Make Like Nike and Wing Your Way to Victory

Get it? Just do it. It’s a Nike joke.

Hi, welcome to my biweekly publication about overthinking things, in which I overthink a writing-related topic for you reach Tuesday and Thursday. Today’s installment is on not overthinking things, a subject on which I am obviously an expert. This is a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do sort of thing. This is also a topic I have written about in Shelf Life before but it’s never a bad time to beat a dead horse.

Today I address those among us who are out there overthinking things; specifically, those overthinking their creations and the reception of them; and more specifically, to the overthinking writers and shoppers-around of writing. A fun fact about this article is I spent too long overthinking it and didn’t get started till really late. By “overthinking it” I mean “shopping for garbage online.”

There are a lot of things I think you cannot “over” do. For instance, overreact. The reaction you have to something is just your reaction to it, and I don’t believe there’s any such thing as an overreaction—just a reaction. Typically it’s someone else and not the reaction-haver who makes the determination that a reaction was over whatever arbitrary threshold they have for the dignity and sobriety of reactions. The statement “you’re overreacting,” as far as I can tell, exclusively means that the person who is witnessing your reaction doesn’t like their own reaction to you. But they never characterize that phenomenon as an overreaction. Anyway if someone is having a genuine reaction to something I don’t see how it can be an overreaction. 

But overthinking it? Yes, you can absolutely do that. A sign of overthinking is when thinking about something prevents you from taking action on it. Sometimes we overthink because we’re procrastinating, which is usually in turn because we’re anxious or afraid of beginning (if we stay in the thinking phase, after all, we don’t have to enter the doing phase) or because something is otherwise unappealing. We tell ourselves we’re just preparing for the beginning of the task or endeavor, whatever it is, so that we can knock it out in the best or most efficient way possible once we start. But people can get stuck in the haven’t-started-won’t-start, still-thinking-about-it rut.

Do not confuse “overthinking” (usually bad) with “thinking it over” (usually good and a great way to get people off your case).

For instance, if you have a choice between 

1. Sitting around thinking about writing a masterpiece, or 

2. Writing some garbage

definitely write the garbage. Written-down, drafted garbage is infinitely more valuable than whatever you’re just thinking about writing, no matter how amazing the thing is you’re dreaming up. 

For one thing, the longer you spend fantasizing about the amazing thing you’re going to write when you actually sit down to write it, the more likely you are to get discouraged when you sit down and start drafting. Here’s a hint: For some writers, maybe most writers, but at least a subset of writers that includes some amazing, prolific, published, and awarded writers, the writing as it comes out on the page never quite measures up to the writing as you envisioned it in your head. Are there authors whose work comes out on the page just as beautiful as they imagined it? Maybe; but that’s not all or most writers or necessarily “the best” writers, either. 

The more time you spend overthinking the literary masterpiece you’re going to write, the more likely you are to disappoint yourself when you sit down and start drafting. Especially if it’s your first try—if there’s one concept I’m always hammering away it in here it’s that nobody is just magically amazing at something the first time they try to do it.

(I’m not talking about planning your manuscript, like figuring out the plot and character arcs or outlining, which are handy tasks that many writers find helpful or even necessary. They are not what I mean by overthinking.)

For another thing, you can’t edit an empty page. Many if not most stories shape up in editing, revising, and rewriting. You can’t do any of those things until you draft some words. As someone who is both a writer and an editor, who does both things in paid and unpaid capacities all the time, I can tell you candidly that it’s way easier to improve on existing writing than it is to write something from nothing.

So: What do you do if you’re trapped in thinking-about-writing mode and can’t quite push yourself over the hump into writing mode? When the anxiety or procrastination has the better of you and you’re cycling writing projects through your brain on a loop instead of, you know, writing them? Here are my top three tips to get up and get going on your draft.

Give Yourself Permission to Write Garbage

Usually it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission, but it’s a different case when it comes to asking yourself for forgiveness or permission. Also, it’s you. You don’t have to ask. You can just demand permission. Insist on permission. Grant yourself permission.

When writing starts coming out of you—out of your brain, out of your pen, out of your keyboard—that doesn’t live up to your standard of good writing, that can be discouraging. Never forget that our opinion of what is good writing is formed by reading published writing which has almost always gone through many rounds of revision, rewriting, critique, feedback, editing, and proofreading—often this represents years of many different people polishing that manuscript—before we get to read it. You simply cannot fairly compare your first draft with finished, published work.

Remember: Most of the things you’ve read in your life and appreciated, enjoyed, and admired started out as a garbage draft too. If those writers didn’t give themselves permission to write garbage, we’d all be poorer for it.

Prohibit Yourself From Editing as You Go

Don’t edit yourself while you write. Some writers do this successfully but until you’re at a place in your writing journey where you can consistently put useful words down on the page every time you sit yourself in front of the manuscript, then editing while you write is going to stifle your ability to get to that place.

I do find it useful, when I am coming back to a manuscript after a few days away from it, to read through the last few paragraphs I wrote and give them a quick brush up on my way to starting the draft again. What I make sure to stop myself from doing is pausing after every sentence to wordsmith it. Wordsmithing is for later. For so much later. 

I also prohibit myself from editing in my head as I’m putting words down, because this tends to trip me up as well. What I mean is, I come to a sentence and halfway through I realize I don’t have the perfect, correctly nuanced word for the sentence. Maybe I have a half dozen words that are close but I can’t quite arrive at the perfect word. This is where I consciously stop the mental search and slap in one of those half dozen “close enough” words to get the meaning down and move on, instead of stopping the whole show to contemplate my word choice. Wordsmithing is for so much later. My rule of thumb while I’m drafting is not to get hung up on a word—even a new character’s name or a made-up place name—for more than a few seconds. If I can’t get the perfect thing in 10 seconds or less, I just throw a placeholder in there and move on. Find and replace is your friend. You can fix it in post.

Write Something Else

Your brain just won’t let you get started on your masterpiece? Fine: Write something else. Sometimes when I’ve devoted time to overthinking a project, it gets so big and intimidating in my mind that now I’ve hamstrung myself and I don’t feel as though I can start it. Maybe it’s too complicated now, has too many moving pieces, or maybe I’ve convinced myself that I need a whole host of settings or characters figured out and I can’t start until I do all that. Whatever the hold up, there’s a solution adjacent to the story I’m working on: Write something else—anything else.

The anything else might include:

• Write a slice of life or vignette related to my main story to help get the motor running.

• Write a short story from one of the concepts in my unused idea bucket.

• Use a writing prompt to write something completely fresh and unrelated, forcing my mind into creative mode.

• Doing some freewriting, like a morning pages exercise (I wrote a bit about morning pages last year).

Writing puts your brain in writing mode and in my experience my brain stays in that mode when I’m done writing. It takes me a while to come out of writing mode when I have finished writing for the day, and I often have to stop what I’m doing and scribble down thoughts or sentences for my next writing session until it tapers off. This is part of the reason I write Shelf Life: I make my brain go into writing mode at least two times a week. Most of my writing ideas come to me in the hours after writing a Shelf Life.

The more you write, the easier it gets to write. The more writing experience you get, the better your early drafts will be. Just like anything else, writing improves with practice. Just like anything else, sitting around and thinking about maybe doing it doesn’t help you improve.

When you’ve done something once, you know you have the ability to do it. If there’s a part of your overthinking brain telling you, “you can’t write a novel, why start when you won’t finish?” there’s a great way to shut that part of your brain up which is to write a novel. Do it just one time and never again be able to tell yourself you can’t.

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