 Hello my name is Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here I'm an aspiring fiction author and I do videos on writing and writing related things so if that sounds like something you'd enjoy please like, subscribe and hit the notification bell. Today I want to talk about the power of repetition and not in the way that most people think of repetition as being valuable which I think is in terms of learning a skill or mastering a skill because like Malcolm Gladwell said if you just do 10,000 hours of something then you should become a master. So when you think about repetition from that perspective you just need to whatever you want to do you just need to keep doing it enough and you'll become good at it. I think that's true to an extent but I don't actually think that is the main value of repetition. When it comes to trying to master anything but particularly creative endeavors I think the power of repetition is that as you do the same thing more and more you understand your brain and your psychology more and more and you start to learn about the mental hoops you make yourself jump through you start to learn about the ways you try to trip yourself up you start to learn about the ways you sabotage yourself and the more you do something the more you can see that for what it is as opposed to I'm in my case never going to be a decent writer. The reason I started thinking about this was because I'm currently working on a new project Reciprocal Stalking which I started in Camp Nanarino and it's the first project I've done in about three months and only the second new thing I've ridden in over a decade and even though it's only one weekend it's been a struggle I've been stuck I've been struggling to write for more than 15 minutes at a time I've had an image that's really clear in my head that I can't translate into text I have relationships with no idea of how to build them or I have scenes where I've written like a one-line description only to realize that I don't actually know what's going to happen and I start staring into space and what's interesting is because this is the second project I've done in recent times I remember the same thing happening last time so when I was writing my last book Powerless which was in Nanarimo 2019 I remember the first couple of days in Nanarimo really struggling to do anything and feeling like everything I wrote was cringe worthy and I remember wondering like maybe I don't have anything else maybe the book that had been in my head for over 10 years that I finally revisited and got the first draft done last July July August September maybe that's all I had and it's stupid for me to try to write something else but I was determined to do Nanarimo and I kept telling myself look it doesn't matter if it's bad the point of this exercise isn't actually to write something good it's to learn to write it's to learn to build those skills what I didn't realize I was building at the time though was resilience and even just a better understanding of my own brain and how it works so I could get through it in fact it was the same thing when I started working out as well so when I I've never been athletic probably not a surprise to anyone then I was quite active when I was a kid I did ballet for 12 years I did karate for a couple of years in early adulthood so I was very physical even though I couldn't capture ball to save my life and even though I dabbled in like doing a couple of boot camps or going to yoga or going to the gym occasionally I only really started going to the gym regularly in late 2018 and then it was a similar thing like I couldn't believe how weak I was how out of shape I was how uncoordinated I was and how far I'd let myself go but even though it was uncomfortable and I felt stupid I and I didn't see results I kept going and I soon learned that the discomfort was okay and the lack of coordination was fine and now when I try something new I'm uncomfortable and uncoordinated and realize how much further I have to go but it's okay because I've already come so far and I know that if I did it last time I can do it again what's happening now is the exact same thing so I'm having the same conversations with myself and the same doubts and because I've done it once before I'm able to step back and tell myself like look it's just the first week last time the first week was really hard as well and admittedly there are challenges with this book that didn't happen with the last one one of the big issues with this book is it's very different to anything I've written in the past or anything I've thought about writing in the past it's very character driven it's very more psychological thriller-esque slash romance as opposed to fantasy action in the YA space so it's very much an internal story rather than an external one and I can't just dialogue or action my way through it to get more words done and that's a struggle but what I'm thinking is that if I do this now and I just persist that means the next time I try to tackle something that's difficult and character driven and something that I haven't done before I'll be able to remember this time and go yes the first weeks were really hard yes you could only do 15 minute sessions at a time yes you couldn't action or dialogue your way through it yes even when you did the things that worked last time like sitting down to outline a scene before it worked it didn't work as well yes half the time you felt like you were plagiarizing other books that you used as reference material but none of that mattered because you got to the end of the first draft and you learned something from it at least I'm hoping that's what'll happen if I get to the end of the first draft and learn something from it so in summary the value of repetition isn't simply mastering a skill it's mastering your mindset and being able to understand your psychology and the hurdles your brain is going to throw at you when you're struggling with something and that way the next time you do it you can go oh hello self-doubt hello discomfort hello my old friends I remember you from last time and I know how to deal with you and I know that if I keep doing the same thing I will build more faith in myself and my abilities and you will get weaker and then I can encounter new psychological hurdles next time that wasn't supposed to be the moral of the story the moral of the story was you will get weaker and I will get stronger and I will progress and be able to produce work that I'm really proud of so let me know in the comments if you experience the same thing do you tend to go through the same psychological struggles every time you start something new and if so do you have any hacks or tips for getting around them so please let me know and if you haven't already give me a big thumbs up and I will see you next time bye