Why BICHOK is BS

Hey, your productivity hack is making you less productive

Hey, Runners!

Next week is going to be process week, where we dive into what process is and how to make yours serve you, but today, I wanted to address something I mentioned briefly in a footnote in a previous post.

BICHOK=Butt In Chair, Hands On Keyboard. If you like this process, no shade. But I think that there may be better ways to think about this that don’t presume a writer whose butt is not in the chair and whose hands are not on the keyboard somehow lacks discipline. We’ll be unpacking this later.

Well, guess what? We’re gonna unpack this today.

You’re not lazy.

Look, I get where BICHOK came from as the rallying cry for writers everywhere. Sometimes, the only thing between us and our work is sitting down to do it, and sometimes we don’t do that because we’re afraid. When the only thing between us and our work is fear, sometimes BICHOK can be an effective way to get past that fear, and get into the writing.

Effective, sure. Helpful? I’m not so sure.

Question: Have you ever had writer’s block? How did that make you feel?

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A few years ago, I ran across a video on “The Wall of Awful” from How to ADHD. Many of my dearest beloveds have some form of this disorder, so being able to understand it better helps me in being a support to them.

The basics of The Wall of Awful concept is that when you’re procrastinating or afraid to get to work, it’s like facing down a brick wall. There are many ways to attack this wall, which Jessica explains (I recommend watching it) but one of the ways is just putting your head down and busting through the wall.

That’s BICHOK.

And sure, it works. But in the process, it exhausts you, fails to help you understand why the wall was there in the first place, and often ends with you feeling like when you struggle to break through the wall, it’s because there’s something wrong with you.

Which there is not. And subscribing to the belief that you’re just inherently lazy or undisciplined or afraid of things that aren’t real and what’s wrong with you, anyway doesn’t actually help the situation.

It just puts more bricks in the wall.

I drew my brick wall. Turns out, it’s purple. Who knew?

Writer’s block is real

I have seen a lot of writers out there making the claim that writer’s block isn’t real, you’re just being lazy, just suck it up and BICHOK your way through that brick wall headfirst.

Let me be completely clear here: I absolutely know this advice to be full-on, total, ass-backwards, and (most of all) harmful bullshit.

Here’s the reality: There are a lot of reasons why you can’t write when you can’t write, and some of those reasons are part of a healthy writing process.

Yeah, I fucking said it, and you can quote me; sometimes, you can’t write because you shouldn’t be writing.

For example: During my sketch drafts, at the end of every act, I can’t write for a week. I find myself staring out windows, binging TV shows, playing video games… anything but writing.

In my old I’m just being lazy, let’s BICHOK this shit days, I would force myself to write, and I’d bust through that brick wall every day, exhausting myself in the process, but writing every goddamn day because I was just being lazy.

Then, usually about 10-12k words in, I’d suddenly get an insight about how the next act was supposed to go, and I’d have to frog¹ all those words back to where I had stopped, and start over.

This was often about a week to two weeks’ worth of work and energy wasted.

Once I figured out that I have a natural pause in my writing at the end of each act, and stopped forcing that work, I found that I was usually back to work in a few days or maybe a week. But more than that, I was refreshed and energized, instead of exhausted and frustrated.

When is writer’s block not part of a healthy writing process?

After decades of coaching writers, I have discovered that most of the time², writer’s block happens when a writer has unaddressed fears. That’s why I start every workshop with mindset work to help us all look our fears directly in the face, acknowledge them, thank them for trying to protect us, and then send them away to a lovely corner of our minds where they can play and relax and trust us that whatever comes, we’ll handle it.

Doing fear work at the beginning of a writing project, and remembering to touch base with your fears regularly throughout, will mitigate writer’s block tremendously.

Busting through the wall while insisting that you’re stupid and lazy and undisciplined will only make the wall bigger and badder the next time you come to it.

The first thing we’re going to do in Running of the WIPs is sit down with ourselves, address our fears, and learn how to deal with them when they pop up.

You’ll be amazed at how effective this strategy is.

1. In yarn work like crochet or knitting, when you realize that all the work you’ve done past a certain point is flawed, you then have to frog the work… pull out all the stitches you’ve done since to get back to the point before the mistake, and redo all those stitches again.

2. If you are a writer with some form of attention deficit disorder, these blocks may come more frequently, and mindset work may not be enough to overcome them. My personal experience with ADHD and similar conditions is that there’s no way to eradicate this experience entirely (even for writers without ADHD) but compassion and kindness are incredibly effective mitigators. Also, my experience is that people with these conditions are some of the most delightful and creative thinkers I know, and they make excellent writers.