It’s the part of writing that is absolutely the hardest: shutting ourselves off from the world long enough to write more than a few hundred words on the page.
It’s also the part we never actually see. We see writers at parties, at book signings, and on Facebook when they come up for air. But we don’t see them holed up at their desks wearing yesterday’s yoga pants surrounded by half-eaten bags of chips, empty coffee cups, and inspirational post-it notes.
One of my clients is working on a deadline for a Penguin Putnam imprint.
When we first started working together, she had 16 weeks to deliver her manuscript. She is now halfway done.
Hitting this deadline has required a furious pace of weekly chapter deadlines, closing herself off from the world (“I say ‘no’ way more than I am comfortable with,” she says), and thinking about her book constantly (“when I shower, when I’m brushing my teeth, when I’m putting my kids’ shoes on…”).
What she doesn’t spend a lot of time doing is facing blank pages.
Before she sits down to write a chapter, she’ll spend a few hours reading through her notes and thinking through how she’ll connect the various story threads. Many of the threads have already been written (she writes up scenes directly after they happen or as soon as an interview is over — a great tip for making sure you capture your material when it is fresh and full of vivid detail), but need to be connected and shaped into well-crafted chapters.
Here’s something else she does that I love — before she starts writing she thinks about how she wants readers to feel when they read each chapter. For her most recent chapter, she says:
“I want it to feel like a joyride, where you see lots of cool stuff out the window, sometimes you stop and get out and take in the air, and at the end you arrive somewhere you’re totally psyched to be, with someone who made you laugh and feel like you were in good hands the whole time.”
And then she sits down to write.
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What are your favorite tips for getting words on the page?
How do you shut yourself off from the world in order to write? Do you have any rituals that help get you into the flow of writing? Leave a comment below!
(Extra points if you can you guess what novel I had in mind when I wrote this post’s title.)
Great advice! I like to keep Spotify open, and every few paragraphs I blast 30 seconds of 80s thrash. It’s like hitting the reset button on my brain. (For some reason Metal Church seems to work the best.)
I love it! And while 80s thrash may not work for us all, music does play a huge role in my own writing productivity. Just the other day at the office, we found the Spectre station on Pandora. That did it for me!
Nighttime is my best time–after the kids and dog are tucked in their beds. Sadly, this means that I often miss dinner with my guy, but it’s really the only time I’m able to tune everything else out.
I always think I’ll be able to write at night, but usually I’m completely brain-dead by then. Maybe when my kids are older!
It’s always a challenge, but I try to leave a couple notes in the manuscript for the next few pages, so I remember exactly what I wanted to do. That way I can hit the ground running the next day!
Yes! It’s the same principle as leaving yourself a to-do list for the next day applied to writing. Love it.
I absolutely agree that finding the time to truly “time-out” from the rest of the world is the true challenge. Many of my friends, whether song-writers, poets, or journalists spend a great deal of time “obsessing” over their current content before they sit down to write. I am a big fan of keywords. All too often I will lose my train of thought being slowed down by my lack of typing skills…so I’ll keyword myself to death and piece and repiece it back together until it sound the way I want it to.