Switching To A Different Word Processor Can Kickstart Your Writing
How one weird trick — harnessing the “novelty effect” — can help when you’re trying to revise a piece
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Writing is hard. But you know what can be even harder?
Rewriting.
Often I’ve written something — a magazine piece, a blog post, a chapter in a book — and I have to rewrite it. Maybe the editors have asked me to shorten or restructure it. Maybe the language in my first draft was dishwater-drab. Either way, I have motivate myself to re-open the file and git ‘er done.
But rewriting requires me to do something that’s cognitively and emotionally tricky: I have to regard my writing with fresh eyes. I need to be a little bloodless, and see it from an alien perspective. Huh, why did the stupid writer do that? It clearly doesn’t work; I’ll improve it.
Sometimes, achieving that emotional distance is easy! If I’ve been away from a piece for a long while — many days or weeks (or even months) — then the writing really is alien. I’ve practically forgotten much of what I wrote. Diving in and changing things is…
