Tag Archive for: writing:life

Writing has been extremely difficult this month. I’m sure many writers are feeling the same way I am. It’s been hard to focus and harder not to despair. And as the month wore on—and maybe you started processing your grief and frustration—here come the holidays to serve up more distraction and stress! But the thing is it’s not actually too different from other writing times because, as we all know, writing is struggle.

Writing Is Struggle

Getting your thoughts on the page can be a struggle. Telling a coherent story that entertains others can be a struggle. Writing a character who is likeable but flawed can be a struggle. Creating characters who don’t all sound the same or are propped up by cliches can be a struggle. Building a rich world without info dumping can be a struggle. Writing beautiful sentences with engaging images and varied syntax can be a struggle. Using correct grammar can be a struggle!

Finding time to write can be a struggle. Building motivation and momentum in your writing life can be a struggle. Focusing during your writing sessions can be a struggle. Drafting a work to its end can be a struggle. Keeping your attention on a single work can be a struggle. Dealing with your technology and computers and lost data can be a struggle. Organizing your notes and research can be a struggle. Fact checking your real-world details can be a struggle. Writing to your market or your genre can be a struggle.

Finding an agent can be a struggle. Pitching your story can be a struggle. Designing covers, or even just inspiration mood boards can be a struggle! Marketing yourself can be a struggle. Finding readers can be a struggle. Posting to social media to build a platform can be a struggle.

And that’s just the writing process! Struggle is built into fiction: conflicts between characters, between your characters and their society or environment, between nations, ideologies, and technologies. The obstacles characters face are what stories are about. Even the coziest books contain problems and struggle, though they might be as simple as running out of an ingredient and needing to take a trip to the market, or being worried about how a requited crush will react to a kiss.

Writing is inherently struggle. It’s baked into the finished product, so it’s no wonder we face so much struggle to write our stories. And maybe—just this once—we can view all that struggle as a good thing. We writers know what struggle is. We know what it means and how to deal with it (even if dealing with it includes a good cry or a frustrated scream). We are experienced strugglers and we still manage to write.

So, while you are mired in the struggle, know that writing is struggle and that it’s something you can deal with. I believe in writing, and I believe in you.

 

 

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I doubt I’m the only writer who’s been feeling a little distracted this month. It can be difficult to keep writing with distractions. Writing requires a lot of energy, focus, and motivation to both tap into your creativity and then translate your ideas into words other people will understand (and enjoy). So when distractions pop up—especially when they’re on a grand scale—it can be almost impossible to write.

Almost.

If you want to keep writing with distractions, here are three things I’ve done in the past month to shove distractions aside and get some writing done.

Three Tips for Writing with Distractions

Exit Your Normal World

Just as a character exits their normal world and enters the special world of a story, so too can you leave your normal writing setting behind and find a new place to write, at least for an afternoon.

After several days of feeling extremely distracted (and anxious) and failing to fully focus, I cleared an afternoon for an outing. I ran some errands and then swung by a bookstore. After wandering the shelves to settle my nerves (and uh, buying a couple books), I grabbed a table in the café and sat down to write.

Going somewhere different—and especially giving myself a relaxing activity beforehand—helped me feel ready to transition into my fictional world and get some work done. I felt great writing, and I still feel good about the work I did that day. Other outings with my writing group have been effective this month as well, so just get out and write somewhere else for a bit and see if relocating helps you find your focus, too.

Fun & Games

The middle part of a novel is all about the promise of the premise—it’s the fun and games that are the real draw of the story, the thing that gets readers to pick up the novel in the first place. Just like how you have to fill your novel with that kind of promise, you can find focus by filling your life with that kind of fun, too.

I started using a new tracking app for my to-do list and putting “write 250 words” on my list encouraged me to clear space in my brain so I could mark the task as completed and earn rewards. Rewards! Fun! Also cute little outfits for my to-do list character.

I’ve also been working jigsaw puzzles with my mom which has been a great way to get my brain to focus on something other than the chaos of the world. Once I was fully focused on the puzzle (and then frustrated by not figuring out where several pieces went), I could shift that focus to my writing. Stealing my focus from a fun task has has been a great way to keep writing with distractions.

Allies

Anyone embarking on an epic quest (writing included) needs to surround themself with allies. This can be a posse, a tribe, a gang, a trio, or whatever other moniker you want to give to your writing buds. But those pals are going to be the companions that help you reach your goals and beat back the distractions so you can triumph!

Writing with friends has always been one of my greatest tools for finding focus. Physically (or virtually) sitting with other writers who are writing encourages me to set aside my distractions and get work done. Okay, sometimes we chat more than we write, but then we’ve relaxed, had a nice time, and all feel guilty together before refocusing on our work.

 

The distractions and frustrations will sadly still be there once you’ve finished your writing session. But if you can find a way to silence their power for a little bit, you are most definitely a writer-hero.

 

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Much of the writing life is about acceptance. We have to accept rejections and passes on our work. We also get to accept publications and contracts! We have to accept our physical and skill limitations. We also have to accept admiration and gratitude. But the thing I unfortunately have to accept right now is that my writing life is not going as planned and therefore, it is time for accepting defeat.

This defeat isn’t about giving up, though. This defeat is about reorganizing my priorities and admitting that while I made a good decision in January to shift my goals, that decision is no longer working for me and it’s time to change the plan.

Accepting Defeat

Two roads diverging in front of a mountain that might symbolize a writer accepting defeat and taking a different path to their chosen goal.

Photo by pine watt on Unsplash

Back in January I was struggling to motivate myself to put time into my novel. My goal in 2023 had been to write at least 250 words a day. Because writing the novel was hard, I was avoiding it, and then slapping 250 words on to something in a rush at the end of the day. That’s not the kind of writing life I want to have, so I made a change. I changed my minimum 250-words-a-day goal into writing 10 minutes on my novel every day. It helped! Suddenly I didn’t feel as much pressure to write a lot on my novel, and I could put in a little time every day and make progress until I felt comfortable. It was a success! I won!

But as the year’s continued, my overall word count has diminished, and I’ve felt less worried about putting in those 10 minutes every day because I’m:

  • busy with other things
  • tired
  • hurting
  • distracted
  • not in the right mindset

I’ve been avoiding my novel AND have started putting words into things just to mark off that I wrote for the day (without any regard for quantity or project). Again, that’s not the writing life I want to have.

So now it’s time to shift. I’m going back to a daily word count. After a few months I may find my footing and decide to change course again, but the relief I feel just from writing this post tells me this is the right thing to do. I am accepting defeat and moving forward so my writing life can be the one I want to have.

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

Every now and then life throws a curve ball that causes you to pause everything. This month I got to field two curve balls. The first was a week-long absence of my computer while I had the battery replaced. The second came the same day I picked up my computer, when I started getting sick and tested positive for covid! Even “little” illnesses affect me quite severely, so covid had me in bed for multiple hours every day with extreme fatigue, dictating a necessary pause to my writing and editing life.

Giving up my computer for a week wound up being refreshing. I spent more time working on my novel (on the iPad) and less time spinning my wheels on the internet. I also made a lot of progress on my office clean-up. Not to mention, my computer is running much more efficiently now!

I was looking forward to catching up on work and obligations I had to put aside while I didn’t have my main work device but getting sick threw my remaining plans for June out the window. As of writing, I’ve had severe fatigue for two weeks, requiring me to spend a lot of time lying down and resting. (Who knew you could get so exhausted sitting up and watching TV?)

There are many things I didn’t do in June that were on my to-do list. I’m hoping to get caught up quickly in July (like editorial pages—first priority!), but I request patience from everyone while I’m still recovering.

I feel like there’s a sunny side to this—something about reassessing priorities or the benefits of narrowing your focus—but I’m still too deep in the covid fog to uncover it. Maybe I’ll have it worked out by next month.

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

I made a difficult decision this month to break the chain. After struggling to find the time and energy to work on my novel in any kind of meaningful way, I took a hard look at my writing life. I assessed what my days were like, what my stress levels were like, and why I kept putting off writing. I looked at my motivations and distractions and my goals. My precious, precious goals.

I’ve been writing at least 250 words every day, and after five years I decided it was time to break the chain.

Evolution of a Goal

When I first set the goal of writing 250 words every day, it was a path to a specific end goal. I wanted to move from being a daily writer to someone who writes 1,000 words every day.

I got it in my head from reading the habits of prolific and successful authors that the only way to “Make It” was to write 1K–2K every day. Which I was not doing. (Which I currently have no hope of growing into either, but we’ll get to that.)

My first steps on this path had gone well. I transformed myself first into someone who wrote daily, and then into someone who wrote at least 100 words a day, and then into someone who wrote at least 250 words a day. And most days I wrote more than that!

The original plan was to continue to up that goal every year—or whenever the minimum word count seemed “too easy”—but then I had a reality check.

Reality Check: Getting Intentional

So, like, writing a minimum of 250 words every day is fine. I was able to write 250 words when I was distracted by DragonCon, sick with covid, depressed, throwing up from a food allergy, and in many other really sucky situations.

But many of those times when I was writing those 250 words under less-than-ideal circumstances, I was also not writing intentionally.

I had fallen into the trap of writing literally anything to not break the chain—and then amassing starts of projects I was never planning to continue (mostly because they were babbling for the sake of word count).

I made the decision to write from a project list or with a specific project series in mind (like Writer Resources posts). And things got better. For a year or two. But I still had a problem.

Break the Chain (When It Binds You)

Whenever time was short, my stress was high, my mental health was low, my exhaustion had a vice grip on my brain—I wanted to write the easy words and keep putting links in the chain of 250 words a day.

“Easy” writing for me often equates to nonfiction posts or presentations about writing. In the last year, while I’ve been suffering another round of severe depression and heightened anxiety, I have written way, way more blog posts than fiction.

I have a specific end goal in mind again—a different goal than trying to write 1,000 words a day (which I have also given up as crazy-pants-thinking I don’t need in my life)—that goal is to write a draft of a novel. While writing 250 words a day would help that goal, it’s too much pressure right now.

At the start of a project, while I’m hemming and hawing, questioning my decisions and direction, and just figuring it all out, I don’t need the added pressure of making sure I’m hitting a daily word count. And trying to hit that daily word count was preventing me from putting time into my novel because I knew those weren’t easy words, I wouldn’t hit my 250 goal, and stress! Not writing! Ahhh!

And that, my friends, is why it’s time to break the chain. I have moved away from the original goal, the revised goal is no longer serving me, and it’s time to find some new habits to help support the writer I am today.

(But, uh, still a daily writer… FOR NOW.)

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

The end of the year is a time for reflection. For writers, that reflection often includes taking assessment of how many things we published or finished, or maybe how much progress we made in a novel—or if you’re an industrious little tracker (like someone around here), how many words, hours, or pages you wrote over the year. Inevitably that reflection turns to the future and to setting writing goals.

Writing goals for the new year should be set on your previous goals, the progress you made, and what your priorities are now. Frequently I’ll look back on goals I made and realize I didn’t even remember setting those goals, which means I did nothing about them over the year. (And ultimately means they weren’t actually that important to me and I probably should have set different goals.)

Let’s talk about how to set better writing goals that support our long-term writing hopes and short-term realities.

Setting Realistic Writing Goals

Define Your Priorities & Reality

Before you start dreaming up writing goals, you need to decide what’s important to you. While that should include what’s important to you about your writing life, it should also consider everything else about your life.

If spending more time with your kids or learning how to knit has become an important part of your life, you need make time for it. Balance your writing goals against your other goals and priorities so everything fits together.

Your writing goals don’t always have to be about doing more. Sometimes making a writing goal to write for only 1 hour per week, or to write 100,000 words fewer than last year, or to write 1 novel instead of 3 is the right call. You’ll feel more successful when your goals match your reality, and you can check them off instead of continuing to shuffle them to next year.

Limit Your Goal List

One of the mistakes I’ve made in the past is trying to tackle too much at once. A list of writing goals that is ten items long has at least six things that will be forgotten or ignored. It’s too hard to focus when there are too many goals, and it’s too easy to forget what you’re not actively working on.

Three or four focused goals that meet your priorities and reality are more powerful than ten goals you wish you could achieve in a perfect world.

Subjective & Objective

Many writing goals are objective:

  • Did you finish your novel?
  • Did you write 200,000 words?
  • Did you write every day?

Those goals all have an easy yes or no answer, and you can check your progress throughout the year and have a good idea if you’ll achieve your goal. (For example, if you need to write 100,000 words in October to meet your word count, you can probably assume you’re not going to make it.)

While it’s good to have a goal you can measure, in a creative life it can be demoralizing if you realize you won’t reach your goals. When you know your goals are out of reach, it can be harder to make any progress toward them, which defeats the whole purpose of writing goals!

Instead of basing all your goals around objective metrics, include some goals with a subjective component. These goals might include something about craft development, your mindset toward writing, or how you feel about your work in progress. What’s something you want to change about your writing life or process? What’s a goal you can set to put you on the path to the change?

Writing Goals

Taking this advice, here are my four writing goals for 2024.

  1. Write 200,000 words.
    It’s me, you knew there would be a wholly objective word count goal.
  2. Complete a novel draft.
    The planning is complete, and the draft has started! If you want to follow this journey in detail, check out the Behind the Novel tier on Patreon. I’ll be talking all about my novel writing process (successes, frustrations, and failures) over the course of the year.
  3. Clear more mental space for writing.
    I’ve been working on getting my physical space more organized in an effort to declutter my mental space. I want a physical space that lets me drop my baggage and focus entirely on my work. While there are some objective elements to this goal, how much mental space is cleared is definitely a subjective assessment.
  4. FOCUS.
    If I do nothing else, I want to focus on what’s in front of me and not let other projects or ideas distract me—even if they’re really cool! (I do have some leniency for other projects that have been sitting on the burners, but the most time and focus over the year needs to be on the novel until it’s got a full draft!)

So, that’s what I’m working on next year. What are your writing goals for 2024?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

Saying you’re going to write a book is easy. So is deciding to write 250,000 words this year. It’s also easy to say you’re going to write 1,000 words every day or get a story published. Writers have no trouble setting goals—the difficult thing is taking actions that will actively support your writing goals.

I’m great at making goals and getting distracted. It’s not that I forget the goal I made—I’m just really good at finding other interesting projects that demanded my attention, time, and energy. In some ways it’s a form of procrastination. There could also be a little self-doubt or imposter syndrome worming their way in there if the goal I set feels bigger than what I think I can accomplish. Whatever the underlying cause of the distraction, I wind up working on things other than my intended goal.

So how do you support your writing goals instead of getting distracted?

Support Your Writing Goals

Keep Your Goal Centered

A sculpture of a hand supporting a tree that is growing lopsided, much in the way that you need to support your writing goals using whatever props you can.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

The first thing is to keep your goal centered within your writing practice. If you’re planning to write a book, set daily, weekly, or monthly targets to help you achieve that goal. Those targets can be the number of hours you work on the book, the number of words you write, or some other measurement of progress.

Give the book pride of place in your writing schedule. Devote the most time and energy to that book. If you have other writing obligations (most of us do), try to either work on your book first or devote more quality time to your book on another day.

Ignore Distracting Opportunities

Don’t take on other time- and energy-consuming projects that are unrelated to your goal. If your goal is to get a short story traditionally published in a magazine, don’t work on a novel. Devote your time and energy to reading and understanding and writing short fiction.

Becoming a slush reader for a magazine can help you with your research in that regard—it can give you an insight into what publishers are looking for in a short story within your genre. But agreeing to review novels won’t support your short story publishing goal. (And at some point, you might want to give up that slush reader job to focus on your own writing.)

Goals Take Time

Goals take time to achieve. Remember, it’s easy to list your goals, but it’s much harder to achieve them. Even the fastest novel drafters don’t show up to the page with an empty mind. They’ve spent time thinking about the story, if not writing down their planning.

Give yourself space to focus on your goal and work toward it a little at a time. If you have a deadline, set landmarks to help you get to your goal. If you don’t have a deadline, find other landmarks or ways to ensure you’re working toward your goal and making progress.

And progress does not mean 1,000 words a day, even if that’s your goal. Progress can mean writing 250 words per day for three months, and then upping that daily word count. Give yourself time to get there!

Adjust Your Behaviors or Responsibilities

If you’re able to, adjust your behaviors and responsibilities to align with your goal and focusing your time and energy on that goal. Instead of reading only fiction in your downtime, read books on novel writing or publishing. Instead of blogging those novel reviews, blog about short story reviews.

Or if you have a Patreon and are shifting your goal to writing a novel, maybe change one of your reward tiers to talk about the novel writing process. (Which is what I’ve just done—details at this link!)

If you have other writing responsibilities you normally perform, consider how they can work to support your writing goal, and then shift them so your goal is centered in your writing life.

 

Achieving your writing goals is possible, but first you have to support your writing goals! Look at the other things you do and ask, “how is this going to help me meet my goals?” Make sure you give yourself time and energy to devote to projects and tasks that will help you make progress. And while you’re doing all that—give yourself the grace to make a misstep and course correct. Adjusting your schedule, expectations, and focus is all part of the writing process!

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

If you’ve been following along for the past year, you already know I’ve been taking a long break from novel writing to take care of my parents. With the major illnesses under control, and adjustments and new routines established, I can finally inch back into novel writing. This means refamiliarizing myself with plans, getting back into the characters’ voices, and figuring out what’s been percolating in my head while I’ve been away. In short, it’s a novel writing return!

I know I’m not the only one who’s been in this situation—coming back to a novel after a long (sometimes years long) break—so I wanted to share what I did this month to reconnect with my novel.

Take Stock Before Writing

The first step is all about taking stock and figuring out where you left off. For this novel, it included reading over the outline and making notes where the plot seemed a little draggy. (Turns out in the two years away, the outline did not magically fix itself.)

I have many different parts of this story drafted, but since I’m working from a new outline, I decided to not bother rereading any drafts. I will be incorporating things from previous drafts, but I think I’d prefer to revisit those as I get to each scene since my outline is so detailed.

I also discovered I created a writing schedule, which will help with the next step….

Update the Novel Plan

Updating the novel plan starts with updating the outline. I only had a few notes to address in the opening chapters, but they required shifting scenes and chapter breaks, which also created a need to update the story map. (The story map is a document that tells me who is in each scene, where it takes place, and which plot threads it involves.)

The novel plan also includes plans for how to write the novel, specifically what my writing schedule will be. The schedule I previously devised had me writing 3–4 scenes per week, and while I aspire to that level of productivity, it’s just not realistic with my other obligations.

Instead, I looked at the estimated word count of each scene and then doubled that number (because I know the chaotic, word-heavy way I draft). Keeping a realistic goal in mind, I decided I am unlikely to write more than 4,000 words per week, so that base schedule has me writing 1–2 scenes per week.

Renewing Voice

Reconnecting to a novel includes reconnecting to the characters. Because it’s been a hot minute since I wrote anything substantial for these characters, I wanted to reacclimate myself to their voices. I picked a few moments and various character combinations to write about and went at it!

Making my novel writing return by starting with some odd moments let me approach the writing at a slower pace while I was still finishing plan adaptations. It also meant I could test some of my plans to see how much I can actually write on a busy day with my new routines and schedules.

Novel Writing Return!

The hardest part of the return is to stop dawdling and get writing. That means officially writing a scene that will—gulp—go into the novel.

So that’s for next month! 😅

(Seriously, updating the outline and story map took longer than I originally thought it would—but no regrets about that time spent! For me, the planning stage is important to keeping my brain on track and untangled as I draft. Other writers struggle with the planning and revision; my writing struggle is drafting.)

I am coincidentally starting my draft in November, though not doing NaNoWriMo. Anyone else setting ambitious writing goals outside of a challenge structure?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

Ask a publishing professional what you should write next, and they’ll never tell you. “Write what you want to write,” they’ll say. They might say writing what you want will produce better results, or that no one can guess a trend. But there’s another aspect I’ve never heard someone say but am now realizing is essential to the creative process: You have to trust your gut.

Trusting your gut as a writer applies to many different aspects of the creative process. You have to trust your gut when you’re drawn to write your next project. Or when you’ve chosen a weird name for your main character. Or when your characters go off your planned course, but it feels inevitable and right in your gut.

There’s also a point when all your research looking for the right home, agent, or editor for your manuscript ends, and you just have to trust yourself to make the right choice. Sometimes you just feel good about something, so you send your email off into the world because it feels like the right time, the right person, and you hope.

That hope is part of the publishing process, too. It’s the thing that keeps writers going after a stack of rejections and years of work and refinement. It’s what pushes writers to write the next thing, submit the next story, and do it all again, despite the difficulty, frustration, and feelings of failure. But we keep going because something in our gut keeps pulling us forward, and we keep trusting it to lead us in the right direction.

I’ve been too in my head about writing recently. I’ve been too caught up in the “right way” to start a novel. Too busy analyzing where to best spend my time. Too lost thinking about writing instead of slapping words on the page like a writer. I haven’t been spending much time listening to my gut, and that has got to change.

I’ve had a lot of distractions this month (mostly in the form of covid), so I haven’t made much progress on this change, but knowing what my next steps should be is making me feel more confident about my writing future.

How about you? Do you trust your gut when it comes to writing? Any suggestions on how I can get better at trusting my gut again?

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

Well, this month certainly has been a year, hasn’t it?

First, I hope wherever you are, you’re safe, have everything you need, and are scared enough to take every precaution but not so scared that you’re immobilized. Mostly, I hope you’re taking care of yourself in whatever fashion that needs to be. (Which could be taking a break from writing—we’ve all been through a trauma, so give yourself the space to deal with your own feelings before dealing with your characters’ feelings.)

For me, quarantine isn’t that different from my normal life. I already work from home and am used to socializing online. I can’t escape to write at my favorite restaurant or in the shadow of Hogwarts, and my in-person writing group has now become my other online writing group, but mostly life is the same.

I shower every day, put on a nerdy t-shirt, and write.

I spend a little more time re-watching old favorites and reading comic books and escapist fiction.

I have anxiety attacks and try to forget whatever doomsday numbers I saw in some article.

I read on the porch and take pictures of how pretty things are around me (or of the cheesecake I’m eating because that cheesecake is saving my life at the moment).

I take naps with my cat.

I try to focus enough to edit, write Patreon posts, or whatever else I’m supposed to be doing while counting how many days it’s been since my last possible virus exposure.

I have difficulty sleeping, but eventually drift off and wake from anxiety dreams.

I order tea online. (I probably have enough tea to see me through this.)

I revisit our virus protocols for quarantining or cleaning anything coming into the house and am grateful that my paranoia isn’t being treated as something negative.

I run additional sessions for my writing group because writing is the one constant in my life and right now it doesn’t have to be such a lonely profession. It shouldn’t be a lonely profession. Writing has always been one of the things connecting me to people, and now more than ever it’s the connection I need.

 

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