Find your writing peaks at the end of year

In a second seasonal article, I share some advice on what writers can learn from colonoscopies (yes, you read that right), and why we need to seek out good things to wrap up a year of writing. Point your camera at the positive to keep writing.

As the year draws to a close, it’s the perfect time for us to embark on a journey of reflection, celebrating the crescendos and contemplating the finales that have shaped our writerly adventures. Scratch that.

To be honest, I’m not really feeling it myself.

There is no polite way of putting this, but December feels like the arse-end of a year. So today’s tip is how people’s experience of colonoscopy can help your writing.

Noticing good things

Earlier this year I shared my daily routine of noticing good things. Since I started this practice in 2017 I have amassed nearly 7,000 good things. It’s a form of cognitive reframing popular in positive psychology and practised by Pollyanna-ish types like me. It counters the evolutionary negativity bias humans have developed in order to survive.

Read: The power of noticing good things

In it, I mentioned research from Nobel-prize winning professor of psychology Daniel Kahneman called the ‘peak end effect’. Delving further, I found that this rule was based on a study of colonoscopies, something even Pollyanna’s irrepressible optimism would struggle to find positive.

The peak end effect

This psychological principle was studied by Kahneman and his colleague Donald Redelmeier in a series of rather uncomfortable experiments. Having hit upon colonoscopies as being particularly unpleasant they decided to repeat the procedures to investigate further.

They found that people judge an experience based on how they felt at its most intense point - the peak - and at the end. Rather than being able to evaluate the average or sum total of an experience, it flattens our memory creating more of a snapshot. While the peak could be either a good or bad experience, our negativity bias often means means we remember the low points.

If like me you are reaching the end of year having failed to meet a writing goal, you might be feeling pretty low. If I focus on that, I forget the good things, or even the average experiences, that have happened. If I look harder, there’s lots more: I had a book published in January, I worked consistently on my novel in my spare time, and with Chris we wrote a weekly newsletter on Substack then added in a second weekly edition with our tips.

Wrap up your year of writing

As I wrote previously:

“If we follow our brain’s natural instinct to remember the negative, then over time that’s what our memories will be made of. Consider your memory to be like a camera in that it will only capture what you focus on. The good news is that we can change that focus, it just takes a little effort.”

If you’re up for a little effort, look back at your year of writing.

• Find your peaks. Did you hit any milestones? Were there any breakthroughs? They could be new ideas or working your way through a block. What would you like to celebrate - it doesn’t have to be an output, it could be a practice, a new way of working.
• Focus on the end. You might have fallen short of your goals but there’s still time to finish positively and wrap up the year. What can you do, right now? How can you connect with your writing project? Remember - it can be in a very small way.

I’d love to hear what writing snapshots you’d like to remember from the year or tell us how you’d like to add this psychological principle to your writing sandbox.

This article first appeared in Breakthroughs & Blocks.