All-Or-Something Thinking

Mood Tools Week 2: Reject All-or-Nothing Thinking

Photo by Hayley Murray on Unsplash

Does this scenario sound familiar?

You planned to write for an hour, but your morning exploded, and now you only have fifteen minutes, so you decide today’s a bust and you’ll just write for two hours tomorrow. But during the night a storm dumps a foot of snow, so you spend the two hours you were planning to write shoveling all the while promising yourself you’ll put some real writing time in when your kiddo goes to a sleepover this weekend. But come Saturday, your kiddo’s friend wakes up with a fever, so your kiddo’s home all weekend, and you decide your writing can wait until Monday morning.

You’ll start fresh on Monday.

Definitely Monday.

This kind of all-or-nothing thinking is one of the more insidious ways that anxiety can hijack your writing practice. The example above relates to time—if you can’t write for all the full hour planned, then you won’t write at all, dammit—but all-or-nothing thinking can wear any number of disguises:

• Because your first drafts don’t come out perfect, you write nothing at all.

• If you don’t have the answer to a historical question raised by your story, you put off writing until you’ve finished your research.

• Or—in a particularly heartbreaking example—when your job leaves you too fried to write you decide to hold off on writing anything until after you’ve retired.

All-or-nothing thinking sucks the joy out of your writing by selling the lie that anything less than perfect—the perfect writing session, the perfect amount of time, the perfect prose—is worthless.

To which I say, poppycock!

If the Center for Disease control kept statistics about the death of writing projects—talk about a missed opportunity!—I’m convinced perfectionism would consistently be ranked as the number-one cause of death among otherwise viable projects.

Perfectionism keeps you from starting, and if by some miracle you do start, perfectionism hisses at you to stop. Which would be easy to ignore if the message was just stop, stop, stop all the time, but perfectionism disguises itself as temptingly logical all-or-nothing thinking:

• Because we really might get more done if we wait for a perfect window of time, right?

• Because if we never actually write our imperfect sentences, we’ll never have to figure out how to fix them!

• And because sometimes it really does make sense to hold off on writing until we bone up on our history—better to confirm the historical figure you plan to feature in the next scene was actually still alive before you waste time writing it, right?

All-or-nothing thinking is just window dressing for fear. You’re afraid to write, so you invent compelling arguments about why it really would be best to hold off. But then weeks and months and—in the worst case scenario—whole lives go by, and your all-or-nothing thinking has won again:

You’ve written nothing.

The trick to beating all-of-nothing thinking is to notice that you’re doing it and replace nothing with something. For example, at the end of last week I finished the fourth section of the draft of my novel and was looking forward to getting started on the final section.

I was looking forward to starting the final section in theory, anyway.

While there’s a certain giddy glee to being six chapters from the end of a draft, big writing transitions are always tough moments for me. The section I just finished was a historical narrative with a distinct voice that I’d been immersed in for months. Moving onto the last section of the book means leaving behind the comforting confidence of a fourth section I’ve mastered¹ and embracing the pernicious uncertainty of the final section—a new voice, a new point of view, and the expectation that I’ll actually stick the landing.

But, you know. No pressure.

Needless to say, come Saturday I found myself engaged in some epic procrastination.

Normally a morning writer, I still hadn’t written by late afternoon, and my all-or-nothing thinking started hissing at me:

You’ve blown the big writing day you wanted to have.
Best to skip the day and come back fresh tomorrow.

As tempting as it was to postpone floundering at the start of the new section, I knew I’d feel more pressure breaking ground after a day off, so I compromised.

I printed out the chapters for the section I’d just finished, punched holes into them, and—as I collated those chapters into my story bible (a binder stuffed with the notes, outlines, and drafts for my current project)—skimmed scenes I knew would be referenced in the final section of the novel. Once that was done, I flipped to the section of my binder devoted to the last section of my novel, read through my notes about the ending, then spent some time freewriting about changes that needed to be made to accommodate how the writing in the previous section had surprised me. Finally, I wrote the first line of the new section so that when I sat down to write on Monday—Sunday has become a day off so I can draft Hibou, of course—I wouldn’t have to start from nothing.

Forty-five minutes shaping the ending wasn’t the big writing day I’d planned for, but it was something when I was in grave danger of doing nothing. And where writing is concerned. something is (almost) always better than nothing.

That said, all-or-something thinking can see you through more than just the temporary wobble of confidence at the start of a new section of your novel—all-or-something thinking can also help you keep writing when the world around you is crumbling.

In 2015, my parents both got terrible health news a few weeks apart, and crisis management swallowed me whole, writing time and all. Though I’d had a regular writing practice before their diagnoses, a few months into the crisis, I realized two things: 1) I hadn’t written in months, and 2) given the gravity of my parents’ prognoses, it would be very easy for a few months to turn into years, so I reached out to a coach who listened to my dilemma and suggested I consider trying to write for just five minutes a day, a suggestion that—quite frankly—pissed me off.

Five minutes?

I was mourning the loss of a practice that had me writing two to three hours a day.

Frankly, the suggestion that I work for five measly minutes felt condescending.

But, then again, I literally had nothing to lose, so I gave this five-measly-minutes plan a try, and found—to my enormous annoyance—that writing for five measly minutes actually felt amazing.

In five minutes I could reread a scene or revise a paragraph or draft a new sentence or two. Not the volume I was used to when I was writing regularly, but it was lightyears from the nothing I’d done since the diagnoses. And, of course, five minutes quickly became ten, ten quickly became fifteen, and suddenly I realized that writing for a half hour in the morning allowed me to hold onto my image of myself as a writer, no matter what scary elder care tasks were in store for me that day.

But the best part of all-or-something thinking is the way it compounded. One small choice at a time, I reclaimed my writing as a priority and rebuilt my writing practice smack in the middle of the most stressful time of my life. If you had told my 2015 self that I’d find my way back to the thriving writing practice I have today by starting with writing for just five minutes, I wouldn’t have believed you. No one choice made the difference, of course, but thousands of choices over time certainly did.

Now, don’t get me wrong.

I’m not suggesting that you commit to making a thousand choices right now.

I’m not even suggesting you think about the thousand choices you might make over the next few years.

What I am suggesting, though, is the next time you think you can’t get to writing on a day you’d dearly hoped you would, ask yourself if you have time to open your project for just five minutes.

The answer will most often be yes, and you’ll just need to summon the courage to do so.

But if the suggestion of five minutes makes your inner taskmaster start rattling off your laundry list of priorities, remember that you have permission to include your writing on that list. You do! You absolutely do! And the way you get your writing on your list of priorities is to insist on adding it five minutes at a time, until five becomes ten, until ten becomes thirty, until the habit you had to talk yourself into becomes a priority you believe—truly believe—you have a right to set.

Because you do.

So consider becoming an all-or-something thinker because I for one think it’s time—maybe past time—for your writing self to be on the list of the loved ones you make time to care for.

Don’t you?

Take Away from MOOD TOOLS WEEK 2: ALL-OR-SOMETHING THINKING

“The way you get your writing on your list of priorities is to insist on adding it five minutes at a time, until five becomes ten, until ten becomes thirty, until the habit you had to talk yourself into becomes a priority you believe—truly believe—you have a right to set.

Because you do.”

1. For this draft anyway.