Last week, we shared our Writing Caves. This week for our “How I Write” series, we chose to focus on our writing process. Not the big overall picture, that could be a book in itself, right? But rather the mechanics of sitting down to write and what rituals or routines we have to prepare ourselves and get into the zone.
The first thing I have to do is clear my email. This usually involves nearly wearing out my delete key, but often there’s some keepers. Next, I open up iTunes and if I’m going to add some serious word count or do a journal entry, I pull up my playlist for either Peter Gabriel’s Passion or the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I can’t do new words with lyrics. I like Passion because it’s an hour long and it builds in tempo and intensity the entire time. That’s been my go to album for focus since college.
Once I’m settled in my chair with a bottle of water, I open up Excel for my spreadsheets and Word for the actual manuscript. Once I’m ready to dig in, I open up online-stopwatch, a great little flash timer that Bria Quinlan turned me on to. I think I wore out 2 or 3 regular kitchen timers by that point. It’s great! It only startles me if I’m using headphones to listen to music and concentrate when I’d take my laptop to work at the martial arts studio. So, 20 minutes on the virtual clock and I’m ready to go.
That’s it in a nutshell. Everything’s meant to focus me inward instead of looking around at all the shiny. I can’t unplug my phone in case one of the kids needs me from school and I’ve NEVER been someone who can listen to a ringing phone. Yes, we have an answering machine. Yes, I even have caller-id so I could screen my calls. But most of the time it’s more distracting to have it ring and listen to the message than to just answer it.
If I’m doing edits on a story, I usually settle into the recliner with printed pages (for my own stuff) or my laptop (for my CP’s stuff) with a bottle or two of water. Likewise, if I’m doing pre-writing work, I’ll take a pencil and note paper and start scribbling there.
As far as a schedule or when I do my best work… I usually work in the mornings to get things done and out of the way. This also happens to coincide when kids and husbands sleep in on weekends and vacations. That way they don’t have to feel like they’re interrupting me and I don’t get frustrated with interruptions. It also means I can spend the rest of the day with them writing-guilt free. When I first started writing again in 2007, I was writing a lot in the evenings and at night. Homework has gotten harder to help with and everyone needs to go to bed earlier these days, so that hasn’t happened in a while.
I’m in the process of settling back into the “kids are in school routine” and need to look at my writing schedule and make it more efficient. Learning to juggle all the moving parts of this endeavor is quite a challenge, but it’s keeping me out of trouble for now.
What routines and rituals do you rely on? Can you settle in to focus even if you don’t/can’t go through the motions of getting down to business?
To see how a few of my friends write, you can visit their websites, below:
* Alexia Reed * Angeleque Ford * Danie Ford *
* Emma G. Delaney * Kimberly Farris *
I hear you on the kids’ homework getting harder and having to be available to tutor (or teach).
I still haven’t settled into my kids-are-in-school routine yet and mine have been back in class since the first of August.
I think it would have been easier if the start times hadn’t changed on me this year, but that extra hour earlier is awful. Good luck on settling soon!
Great post! I agree that it helps to get the distractions that you can’t ignore out of the way first!
And it’s a great way to start the day with your daily writing quota already met!
Hope you (and the kids) get settled in quickly!
Thanks, Patti! Now, if I can just manage to keep from distracting myself quite so completely to accomplish that! LOL
I can write to lyrics if they’re in a language I don’t know, like Japanese or Gaelic. My son once gave me a CD of anime songs done in Celtic style.
I also heartily recommend Write or Die, by Dr. Wicked. The “evil violins” prod has gotten my fingers moving at the worst of times.
I think that’s why Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soundtrack works for me. I don’t know it well enough and most of it’s instrumental anyway. I’ve tried writing with Spanish, but I suspect I know just a little too much and it becomes distracting. I bet that CD your son gave you is pretty cool, Amber.
I’ve tried Write or Die, but it just never clicked for me. It’s not so much about going against a clock for me, but knowing someone else is working at the same time which is why chat challenges or word wars or the new 1k1hr think on twitter bring in that instant accountability of “So,… how’d we do that time?” that gets me moving.