You or your spouse get pregnant and you begin to see pregnant women everywhere you go.
You buy a new car and suddenly the same model is all over town.
You start drinking green smoothies for breakfast and now everyone at work is talking about green smoothies.
Rest assured, you aren’t going crazy. Nothing magical is going on here. There is no need to go looking for explanations in quantum realm, and there isn’t a glitch in the matrix.
What you are experiencing is simply the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.
Also known as the “frequency illusion,” the phenomenon is a cognitive bias in which your brain becomes excited by something and then seeks out more examples of the thing that excited it. It’s not that there are more pregnant ladies, models of your car, or green smoothies coming into existence. It’s just that your brain is paying selective attention to them.
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is one of the primary reasons that, as a writing coach, I urge my clients to focus on one project at a time.
Writers are creative people. Most are filled with a bounty of ideas. They have stories they want to tell, series they want to write, and other artistic projects they want to pursue. Focusing on a single project for the amount of time it takes to write a full-length book (usually months, if not years) can be extremely difficult for these kinds of people.
When you do focus on a single project, however, it allows you to take full advantage of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Writing gets easier because you become more creative in your thinking.
When your mind is focused on, and excited by, a single concept, you’ll begin to see supporting material everywhere you look. Story beats emerge from moments in your life. New topics for chapters are inspired by overheard snippets of conversation. In the movies you watch and the articles you read, potent material for your book and fixes for story problems jump out at you again and again.
This simply doesn’t happen when you’re constantly moving around from one project to the next, without finishing any of them. Your brain is so busy trying to shift its attention from one idea to the next that it can’t get excited about any one of them long enough to allow the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon to emerge in a beneficial manner.
If you make the (sometimes difficult) decision to focus your attention on a single project and follow it through to completion, you’ll be amazed at what the universe will serve up. Amazing content is all around you. Stick with the book you are writing, and all of it will be yours for the picking.
Focusing your conscious efforts on a single project allows your subconscious to do what it does best. You can sit back and let the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon work its magic.
Need help staying focused on one project at a time? Read my article “10 Ways to Stay Focused While Drafting a Manuscript” over at CreativIndie. Then opt-in here to receive 10 MORE focus-based tips for writers.
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