Do you have scheduled writing time?

[David Evil Overlord]

*Goes to the local petshop, and discovers they have no HypnoToads*

 

[TheDustyZebra]

One roommate had a pretty lengthy paper due the next week and didn't start it yet, so while he was under, I put in a suggestion that he would not get distracted - that every time he felt distracted, he would just become more focused on his paper.


So hey, maybe try hypnosis to help reach your goals. It worked for him.

The poor guy's probably been writing term papers for the past 20 years! (Or however long....) Did you ever go back and undo your suggestion?

I have my writing time scheduled for sometime when it's quiet and the kids are in bed and I don't have to get up too early in the morning and I'm not dead-falling-asleep tired. I'm hoping it happens before I'm just plain dead.

 

[Perpetual Man]

Goes a bit dead, does it?

It was only a matter of time before someone did that one....

I work rotating shifts, and my days off are not always on weekends. So I write whenever I can. This morning, I wrote while my wife and son slept in (they are not morning people).

I am hoping this might be the case when they are a bit bigger as my wife is definitely not a morning person and I hope she can pass it on to the boys.

(At the moment the baby is a morning person. And a night person. And a screaming person.) Joys of parenting and all that

 

[Brian G Turner]

It's all about those circadian rhythms. Pinpoint when you're most active in the day and it's usually fairly constant for most people.

Indeed, you can't schedule creativity, as Mouse says, but it's good to work out when you tend to be more creative, and set aside time then where possible.

I feel most creative late at night, so I've made my time then for general work.

Even if you don't write anything new, there are always notes and editing to work through. In a worse case scenario, do some research - ie, read a similar genre work and keep a writer's eye on it, or else look up technical points online.

 

[Kissmequick]

Yeah, I schedule my writing (I have to work round odd shifts/kids but still)

Whether I feel creative or not, I write, and you know when I go back to reread I can't tell the difference between the times I felt 'creative' and those I didn't. Sitting down to write gets me in a creative frame of mind, so I don't feel uncreative for long - waiting for the muse is all very well, but I'm her mistress, not the other way around.

 

[Montero]

For me I am most creative when not tired, can happily edit and can sometimes be creative when a bit tired, and might be able to run a spell checker when really tired.

I do find sometimes that the first five minutes is the hardest - getting back into the groove as it were. I make myself write, sit there pushing, then suddenly realise I have been writing for half an hour and it is going well and several pages are done.You can feel really good at the end of the session having concentrated and worked well. So I don't wait to be creative, before I write, but I do find on some days creativity is at a low ebb and it is a good time to do the writing chores.

So recognising how I am at a given time, whether I have got too tired and need a breather, what is best done in my current state and so on. Usually I can do 40 minutes of intense work, then need at least 10 minutes off - as in stand up, walk around, fill the washing machine, tidy the kitchen, then return to computer. I sometimes find I have been staring at the screen and going nowhere, I look back at when I started (I usually keep a spreadsheet on time spent writing) and often I find that I have gone over 40 minutes - so I walk away.

Working somewhere without internet access is also good. So if you need to look stuff up on the internet, don't. Instead, start a file or files on things you need to look up, put a place holder in the text (e.g. insert stuff about gas giant here) and keep on with the story. Then when you are more tired, go and do the internet research and up date those bits of the manuscript.

 

[Juliana]

When the kids are at school I write between 2-3 hours a day. I'm usually at the computer at around nine am and I can get between 1-2000 words done each time.

Even if I'm not feeling inspired I sit down and write. Its a bit like exercising - you get started and your muscles loosen up? Same with writing, 5 mins in and I'm back in the flow.

I don't write on weekends (kids/ husband are very distracting) although sometimes I edit on paper or work on story arcs. And January was a washout, with kids on summer holiday. I tried getting up at 6 to grab a couple of hours while they were sleeping in but eventually gave up... Got lots of reading done, though, and called it "research"!

 

[Anne Lyle]

I want to set some realistic goals so I can meet them as I start out. I don't want to reach for the stars and find that I cannot reach the goals and then get discouraged.

I suggest trying different methods and seeing what works best for you. I'm at the stage in my career (published author under contract) that I have to write whether I want to or not, so I scrape together every hour I'm not utterly brain dead. I write more and faster on messy first drafts, much less when revising, but I've "won" NaNoWriMo twice so I know I can write 1500+ words a day when I have to!

At the moment I find that my mental energy levels vary a lot depending on what I've been doing at my day job (which can be quite mentally demanding, since I'm a programmer), so I do the bulk of my fiction writing at weekends and then try to exploit any good days during the week (or on less good days, do something productive but less creatively intense, like blogging or reorganising my website). But I'm always thinking about my work-in-progress, and I don't leave it alone for long during a draft.

As for realistic goals - if you wrote an average of 250 words a day, every day for a year, that would be over 90,000 words, which is a respectable length novel. I can write >500 words in an hour, even on a bad day, so it's easily doable if you set aside an hour a day. It took me about 4 years, on and off, to write and rewrite my first published novel, and that was after years of just dabbling, so you really have to be prepared for the long haul.

 

[ratsy]

Well thanks again for all the feedback everyone. It is much appreciated.

I will at this time just try to write some everyday and see how it goes. If I can get 45 min of writing or even 15 min in then I am doing better than not writing at all. My ideas seem to be getting better, Major Story Arc decided, characters developed. So progress is being made.

Thanks again