Your Writing Spot...

 

Your Writing Spot...

Do you have one? One that is specifically carved out for your writing? 

You should. 

And I don't care if it's a TV table and chair beside the basement furnace if your world is packed to the rafters with a thing we humans call life. 

 

Carve out a tiny writer-you lair where your mind and body can be trained to know when it's time to get to work on your WIP - work in progress.

 

And contrary to the pretty pics you've been drooling over in writers magazines and on Instagram, the more perfect and romantic-looking the spot, the lower your writing production level may plummet. You make your hovel too wonderful, and you'll do more day-dreaming than hitting the keys. Fact.

 

Your writing space should have the bare minimum of essentials:

- a desk or a place to lay your laptop

- a chair that will allow you to be comfortable for at least an hour

- table space for a drink and your writing essentials

- a place to fit your book outline/research papers

- (optional) a quiet window view if you need to stare into space for your coffee breaks. Not everyone does.

 * and family knowledge that when you enter this space, unless they are literally on fire, you're not to be disturbed. *It's as much about training yourself to write as it is training your family to know when you write.

 

Writing a long work is about training, and practice stemming from that training, and if you haven't carved out a place in your world to emotionally and physically cue you into knowing when it's time to write, your mind won't get into gear.

 

HOMEWORK: decide on your writing lair locale, fill it with ONLY the essentials, and return to every time your writing session begins. 

 

Your psyche needs to be trained to know when the work should begin.

Follow me. I'll get you there.

A Writing Schedule...

 

A writing schedule...

 

It's a mystery to me that people treat writing and playing the piano differently. 

 

Both require practice.

Both cannot be accomplished simply by owning a piano or a pen. 

 

You will not be skilled at writing by having some pie-in-the-sky romantic notion that to simply plunk down fingers on a computer keyboard will make you the next Hemingway. Hemingway wasn't Hemingway when he started. He became himself after years of practice, under deadline, and forcing from his brain the production of completed works whether he felt like it or not. 

 

For the piano, it's playing the horrid scales. OMG, I just type the word, scales, and I break out into a stress rash!

For writing, it's the work of COMPLETING a story — the start, the mushy middle, and the end. 

 

Most new writers never complete any works. They adore the new story honeymoon phase, but as soon as their idea well runs dry, or they write themselves into a plot corner, the work is dropped, to collect figurative dust in some far-off computer file or desk drawer.

 

The ONLY way a new writer becomes an experienced writer who completes works is to start writing, regularly, and with the intention of completing every work they begin.

 

In my in-person process group, I had the members complete a ONE-PAGE ONLY flash story, due every meeting, so they had to work on the Start, Middle, and Finish of a singular tale. 

It lowered their fears of the Unknown in completing a work. 

It forced them to produce by a deadline. 

And like piano scales, it got their mind trained to story-telling completion.

 

** Have YOU scheduled yourself to do the equivalent of piano scales as a writer???**

 

HOMEWORK: This week, craft a writing schedule for yourself. Once complete, DELETE a THIRD of that schedule. I know you. Your eyes and bigger than your stomach right now.

 

If you have no idea what your best times are to write, 

Your HOMEWORK is: keeping a diary for the next 2 weeks to ascertain when you have free time (no job hours), when you are healthy, alert, not sleeping, and domestic responsibilities are completed. In that diary, also diarize when you SCREW AROUND - the minutes and hours you fritter away playing games or watching TV or just staring out a window. Now, take ONE THIRD of that goof-off time and reschedule it to writing. There is no gain without pain, peeps. Losing 1/3 of your goof-off time won't kill you, and it just might make you a successful writer!

 

Comment below any questions you have, but take this seriously. 

 

You want to finish a book, right? Well, follow me. 

I'll get you there if you do the steps I outline. Now get at'er!