Small steps

One of my treasured memories of my Nana was her mantra, “each step is one step closer”. She applied this equally to both small tasks and to much more challenging situations.

I like this expression because it imparts quite simply the type of cheery optimism that can be all too easy to lose sight of.

It also applies to many different situations, and whether those situations lead to a ‘positive’ outcome or not.

For any writing project this expression is especially true.

Writing a sentence takes you one step closer to your finished piece. Deleting an unhelpful word or confusing sentence also takes you a step closer. Changing one word in the title. Finding one elusive reference work. Each step is one step closer.

Like most of my views on writing and editing, my view on this comes from my own experiences. As a (very) young research student my self-talk was always aspirational but also embarrassingly naïve: “This month I’m going to write a paper on ….”

Of course I didn’t.

I learnt over time to modify my goals: “This week I’m going to write the abstract for a paper on …”

Of course I didn’t.

For me, goal-setting like this caused a guilt problem: “I didn’t write that paper, I didn’t even finish that abstract”.

Quickly the guilt problem became a negative self-talk problem: “I’m so hopeless. I just can’t get anything done. I’ll never finish this paper.”

Learning to recognise and, more importantly, to value each small step as being a step closer took a while but made a big difference to my writing and editing.

Writing should be less end-goal, more journey.

So take a small step or two on that writing project today.