I have soooo much to do – I don’t know about you? I always do this thing, you know how it goes, “Everything will be much quieter in such a such month, I will do it then”. I am now taking the honesty pill more regularly and it helps me see that there will never be a quiet month. Even if I plan for a quiet month and it works, someone will get ill or have some kind of emergency that diverts me. It appears to be the law!
For all of you that are lucky enough to be able to tell your family/ partner/ employer etc that you are taking a month, or perhaps two, off to write your book and if you are able to head to a remote cottage/ lodge / hotel to get scribbling, then this ramble is probably not for you. However, if you write as part of your day job and/ or have to fit writing your novel, in particular, around other life, then you will probably already be nodding along to the dream we all have to discover time-travel. Mind you, whoever you are, please read on, if for no other reason than to wrap the comfort blanket of other people struggling with these problems around your shoulders.
Let’s get on with this focusing then. I am sorry, but with what is happening in my non writing/ creative life, there is no way I can be a ‘Pantser’ even if I wanted to be (and I am not sure I want to be). For those of you unfamiliar with this technical term, it refers to those authors who claim (I am sure they do, honest!) that they write without any plans, the story just comes out by ‘the seat of their pants’ over 80,000 words. There are other types of writer, the ‘Plotter’ (very welled planned) and a ‘Plantser’ (a bit of pants and a bit of plots).
So, back to me… of course! I seriously have a lot of life happening at the moment which includes having to move a manufacturing business to a new site, clearing out not one but two elderly relatives houses (and yes I am grateful both ONLY have four bedrooms) pretty much on my own, setting up a holiday letting business (I will tell you about this possible writing retreat at another time), rescuing a one year old Labrador which a relative can’t cope with and dealing with two dementias, at least one new knee, strokes, diabetes etc, etc and for the record, none of the illness are directly mine.
Despite all of that (and I am sure some of you can throw in additional activities you have in your own lives), I will not give up on my writing. It is me and I will not let myself drown completely under everything else. This means that I have to be hard on myself in terms of discipline. Along this theme, I was having this chat with myself a few days ago and the idea of using NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org ) to help me really get going on the novel part of my writing came into this self-discussion. “This is madness” I hear you cry, well certainly from those of you that know what it is. Please head over to the website and check it out but in short, it challenges you to write 50,000 words of your novel during the month of November.
I did at this point, of course, take myself off to my scrappy bit of paper and had a workshop with myself about the advantages and disadvantages of using something like this, as it is like to sporting equivalent of taking yourself to a month-long boot camp. My musings go like this….the advantages:
- It will keep me focused on a target/goal
- It stops procrastination
- It gets a whole lot of words on a page
- It forces new habits/ routines
It does come with disadvantages though:
- The words written could be a pile of drivel (entirely possible for me!)
- You focus on the word count rather than the plot
- It means getting up before I go to bed
I am looking at this though, as more of a way to keep me focused on something I am committed to. I need to be writing 1666.666 (etc) words a day and this is a way to get me into the routine of getting some good typing into my life.
I saw a quote the other day from Judi Piccoult which read:
“You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.”
This wipes out my concern about wasting time writing drivel in the pursuit of word count then – I can edit it in December because obviously that will be a quiet month! I think the message from my ramblings today is that however we write and whatever we write, we have to be strong in sticking to the rule of “I must write everyday”. Let’s face it, if we don’t we will have nothing to edit.
Hola Kay,
I’m one of those who have a lot of time to write, at the moment. I learned, the more I have time to write, the more I take my time. I took a couple of short trips or retreats to be inspired but I used the candles (the representation of my muse) I traveled with, for an improvised birthday party. Sometimes I need to feel life around me, to write and, I seat in a café but get distracted. Sometimes I stay cloistered at home to avoid distractions and, I don’t feel inspired to write. In the end of the day, I think it is like you wrote: “seat and write everyday”, whatever your mood is, whatever how much time you have, regardless how inspired you feel.
And now, I think I suffer from ADHD because I can’t focus! haha… Thank you for your words, Sandrine
Hi Sandrine
Thank you for your kind words. It is very difficult to not be distracted for all of us but I find mindfulness practices can help. Mindfulness teaches us to let thoughts that demand attention in but then quickly push them away. If we use the same technique when trying to concentrate on a task by pushing everything else except the important thing away, it can work really well.
Kay