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OEO = overcoming editing overwhelm

The best way of ‘overcoming’ editing overwhelm is to avoid it hitting you in the first place. But, it can hit anyway! So, in this post and the previous one, I offer two strategies:

• the first strategy was from my Editing the RedPen Way and
• this one is from Vee Freir’s excellent book: Calm Yourself.

In the previous post, I also introduced my ‘team’ …

… all of whom will benefit from the second strategy: Vee Freir’s START method.

Calm yourself

When ‘overwhelm’ is the issue, calming yourself is part of the solution, the first step in regaining control. Hence my recommendation that you read Calm Yourself.

The author, Vee – her full title is Dr Vee Freir DClinPsych – is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and describes herself as 99% retired.

I first ‘met’ Vee online in 2016 while we were both students of the Self Publishing School. I was working on my Editing the RedPen Way: 10 steps to successful self-editing book; she was working on her book, Learn to Stress Less: 50 simple and effective tips for a stress-free life. (That’s also an excellent read.)

We have yet to meet in real life but, since then, Vee and I have kept in touch and she is a regular attendee of the Wednesday Writers Creative Writing workshops facilitated by me and presented by Kerry Hadley-Pryce.

Vee’s third book, Calm Yourself: Easy everyday ways for busy people to combat stress, provides an excellent strategy for overcoming stressful situations and so it’s perfect for writers facing editing overwhelm. The book is presented in five parts:

1. A bit about stress
2. Things we do all the time but could do a bit differently to help us lose the stress and become calm
3. Things we can add into our day to help alleviate stress
4. The START method
5. Some actions to take

The letters of START serve as reminders of the method:

• Stop
• Take stock
• Acknowledge
• Relax
• Take action

I recommend Vee’s approach as I feel her strategy seems to run parallel to my RedPen Editing cycle.

• While my steps 1-3 aim to avoid editing overwhelm, Vee’s step 1 (Stop) offers a way of coping when we are overwhelmed.
• In her steps 2-3 (Take stock and Acknowledge) and my steps 4-7, we are both advocating reviewing the situation before proceeding.
• I omitted the RELAX step! But, when you read Vee’s book, you’ll see how important this extra step is.
• And, finally, Vee’s step 5 (Take action) maps onto my steps 8-10 – pushing forward to achieve whatever we had set out to do, calmly.

Faced with stressful situations and the need to overcome them to make any progress, any strategy (count to 10!) is better than no strategy (panic!) but Vee’s is practical, well explained in simple terms, and it works …

You do need to read the book to understand why Vee’s method works, and to see her excellent suggestions for small changes to how you approach everyday situations.

For writers, using Scrivener is an everyday situation. So, the question this series of blogposts aims to answer is: what small changes might you make so life becomes less stressful?

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