Allow me to gripe, if you will…
I went to Scooters with a good 90 minutes to write today. Total freedom. And I don’t mean freedom from the kids or anything like that. I’m currently caught up on all of my writing stuff for the rest of the weekend. The first round of my novel revisions have been turned in to my editor and all of my finished unpublished short stories have been submitted to publishers.
So I was like, “Yay! I can take a break from everything else and just work on whatever I feel like working on.”
Happy and excited, I ordered a drink, then sat down and opened my laptop.
I’ll give you one guess of what happened next.
(Drum roll)
NOTHING.
I did exactly what I constantly warn against: I went in to my scheduled writing time without a plan.
And did I ever pay the price.
Here’s a brief recap of the first hour:
1. I decided to start working on a revision of the second novel. I read the first chapter, threw up in my mouth, and realized that I’m just not ready to clean up that mess yet.
So instead…
2. I started writing my third novel. I have a 500-word outline, after all. I read that outline and thought, “This might be cool.” Then I opened up a blank document and wrote the first sentence. And deleted it. And then I did it again–for about ten minutes.
Finally I gave up and moved on to…
3. Duotrope! Why not start something new? I spent another 10-15 minutes browsing through open calls for anthologies, and finally found one that sounded interesting. I opened up a new Word document and wrote the first hundred words or so. I read them over and decided they sucked. So I deleted them. And then I did it again. And again. And again. And then I finally decided that the story idea I had was boring anyhow.
So instead…
4. I went to my trusty work-in-progress folder. I looked at all 15 titles. Not a single one of them seemed to catch my interest, so I randomly picked on and read it. And then I remembered when I stopped working on it. I was stuck and couldn’t figure out how to end it. After staring into nothing for a few minutes, I decided I was still stuck and promptly closed the document.
And then I gave up for the day.
DON’T EVER EVER DO WHAT I JUST DID TODAY.
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times.
Always have a plan when you sit down to write.
Let’s repeat in bold just to get point across:
Always have a plan when you sit down to write.
It’s just too easy to get distracted without one.
What works best for me is to split it up into chunks. For example, if I have two hours, I might do something like this:
- 30 minutes for social media stuff
- 30 minutes to work on a blog post
- 30 minutes to work on short story submissions
- 30 minutes to write some new fiction
With something like that, I’ll set a timer and when it hits the 30 minute mark, I’ll immediately finish the current sentence, then move on to the next task.
You don’t have to use a plan like that. Maybe a word count goal works for you. Or maybe just telling yourself you’ll finish a specific short story, or write a chapter, or finish an outline.
Whatever it is, your changes of actually doing something with your writing time increase by about a million percent (for real!) if you know what you need to get done before you go in.
So next time I complain about writer’s block, I beg all of you to forward this post to me and remind me that I should know better.
Image by Chris Piascik
