Writing Habits

A couple of days ago I mentioned writing habits, in that case with regard to why I write on a little laptop with a keyboard I don’t like instead of using an external keyboard and a giant external monitor. I’d like to talk about the habits I’ve developed to keep myself writing.

I have said it before and I’ll say it again, and I’m not the first to say it: writing every day is the key to finishing a novel. There are, of course, other requirements, so let’s say that’s the first key. If you don’t keep writing, you won’t be able to end up with a novel since the novelisthe writing. This is obvious, but it is also the point where most writers drop the ball and don’t end up with a full draft that can later become a novel.

Because of the mental block I mentioned before—and I know for sure that I’m not the only one out there working against one of those—I needed to really coddle myself, almost trick myself into writing. I expected to do that until it became a habit, but it’s now become a habit to write every day and I still coddle myself. I don’t push myself to write for long hours. I don’t force myself to complete a scene or chapter if I don’t feel like it that day.

I don’t know if this is good or bad. I think I’ll tolerate that sort of nonsense from myself until I’m at the completed first draft level, at which point I will have to break out the right brain and get everything straight and clean. And probably use some of those Scrivener features I’ve been skipping.

By the way, what do I mean by every day? I am not sure whether writing teachers, or those hundreds of guys who write books on writing, would have a consistent answer to this. I’m pretty sure I once read where Stephen King said he wrote 10 pages a day, every day, no matter what, with the possible exception of certain holidays.

Personally my view is that it’s OK to write 7, 6 or 5 days a week, or possibly even less if you have no choice, as long as you are very consistent about it. The key is that it must be a habit that you reinforce massively and must not break. I am a flexible kind of guy and so I am willing to give myself a break once in a while as long as it is never two days in a row. I have been writing generally 6-7 days a week, and that has worked out for me.

I have hit walls a couple of times for reasons I will talk about in later entries, but other than that I haven’t even really wanted to cheat. That being said, there are a couple of major stipulations to this habit I have been fostering in myself. I haven’t exactly been a paragon of self-discipline, and my current writing habits may not even be sustainable long-term.

First of all, I don’t even try to write at home, not very often anyway. I go out to restaurants, or one of the little Starbucks here at Lake Tahoe, and I do it there. I don’t even like coffee, so I have to get it cloyingly saturated with chocolate. At least I stopped getting the whipped cream. I am hoping to be able to take the show on the road when I can start traveling for the year, when winter is over, and maybe even write in some locations that are in the book.

At home, though, all the distractions of heaven and hell are all around me all the time, not to mention Bernadette and other anthropomorphic entities, some of which pass the Turing test. When I am snowed in or otherwise stuck at home, getting my daily writing in is a serious problem because it requires a great deal more self-discipline to resist the temptations.

I am going to have to retrain myself on this point somewhere not too far down the road. At least I have found that if I was into a scene or other bit that I was writing at the time when I had to go home, sometimes I can pick it up that evening and work on it quite a bit more, even to the point of finishing it. That’s a ray of hope and a good precedent.

Second, I don’t have a job except this right now. That sounds like an enormous luxury, but it’s also a serious disadvantage in a couple of ways. When you are working full time or even solidly part time, you are using your wits to one extent or another. You are interacting with people, solving problems, dealing with politics, seeing little dramas play out in the office, that sort of stuff. When you are not going to a job most days, you get a hell of a lot less of that kind of stimulation. Your brain shuts down, you start to get rusty on what people are like, and your work ethic suffers. I find myself really wishing I had started this writing thing years ago when I was working my ass off 40-80 hours a week. I could have found some time to write, and I’d have been a lot more organized about it than I am right now.

So I’m in a position where mental stimulation is a rare commodity and writing at home is a problem. I’ve worked around these issues and the workaround seems to be working so far. Maybe you work full time and can only write at home. I would like to make the point here that it doesn’t matter. If I do what I feel I have to do to get myself to write every day, and I get a first novel out of it, then it doesn’t matter. Later when I am working on the second one with some form of success behind me (hopefully), I think I’ll be able to retrain myself to be more organized, flexible in where I can work, and ideally capable of longer hours.

Or maybe I should get a job at Starbucks.

Speaking of hours spent writing, it’s amazing how much you can produce in even a couple hours a day, several days a week, for three or four months. If you’ve been thinking about trying it, I would really encourage you to do so. I will never get back a single day that I procrastinated before beginning this process. Neither will you, you know. In a way, there’s lots of time to do all sorts of nifty things in life. But in another, more accurate way, there’s precious little, and it never stops leaking out the bottom of the hourglass.