by Gaelen Foley
We are often told that ‘real writers’ don’t wait
for inspiration to strike, but produce a set number of words/pages
on a regular schedule. While this kind of productivity may sound
like it calls for heroic self- discipline, there are ways to make
it a little easier on yourself. The force of habit and the power
of setting can both be used to help you make your daily writing
quota with less effort. All you have to do is put a little forethought
into it.
The idea is to set yourself up with the visual/auditory cues that
trigger your urge to write, and then nurture that spark of artistic
passion into a habit by putting it on a regular schedule. As we
all know, habits are hard to break. When daily output becomes a
habit for you, it’ll be easier to write than to not write.
The first step is to find the things that trigger your creative
state. Creativity is different for everyone. Some writers love working
in a bustling, crowded café; others work best at the beach
or at a park. Well, that does sound terribly romantic, doesn’t
it?
For some reason, none of those work for me. Whenever I have tried
these pleasant exercises, I usually get nothing accomplished and
end up people-watching instead, or I inevitably need that one research
book I didn’t bring. My muse is more the hermit type. Solitude,
silence, tranquillity. For me, minimal stimulus helps me maintain
a single-minded focus, while being in the same place at the same
time every day helps click the “on” button on my creativity
so that my muse realizes we’re at work now and it’s
time to get cooking.
The sheer routine of it, the familiar taste and smell of my coffee,
the sound of my computer booting up, all combine to get me into
my writing state of mind that has become habitual over the years
that I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to be a full-time
novelist. I realize that my preferred setting and unvaried conditions
would probably feel like the solitary confinement cell to many people;
I also realize that most writers don’t have the luxury of
writing full time, with a whole room dedicated to creativity. Don’t
worry, we can work around it! Until I began selling my work, I,
too, had to fit writing into my day however and whenever I could.
For the first few years of my efforts, I worked on a dinky Brother
Word Processor at the kitchen table in the one-bedroom apartment
where Eric and I lived. All those years of struggle have made me
so incredibly grateful for every day that I get to sit down and
write stories for all my lovelies out there in ReaderLand.
In any case, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to
find out what conditions generate your most creative states and
then to seek practical ways to harness the power of setting in order
to access that state so that you, in turn, can produce reliable
results day after day in the form of pages written. I offer you
the following tips and suggestions from what I’ve learned
over the past decade about getting oneself to write AND to enjoy
the process. If you begin to notice that your muse is of the hermit
variety like mine, then the following suggestions might prove of
particular use. As always, if it doesn’t strike a chord for
you, just throw it out!
Work Space.
*Get organized
*Avoid clutter
*Healthy habits
If you’ve only got the kitchen table, there are things you
can do to make it work for you. Heck, that is where Nora Roberts
got started, too, so I guess the rest of us have no excuse! I believe
Nora talks about writing with her then-infant son in the baby-seat
on the table next to her typewriter, and she had, what, fourteen
New York Times bestsellers last year? What an inspiration!
If you’re saving on space, it’s particularly important
to keep your story materials well-organized. This is a good discipline
to get into anyway even if you had a whole room where you could
spread out your materials. For each of my books, I buy a plastic
accordion file (the kind with 13 file slots and a ribbon closure).
They’re about $3 at Office Depot. I label the file slots:
Schedule, Premise, Hero, Heroine, Secondary Characters, Plot, Charts,
Settings, Bibliography, Synopsis, Questions, Feedback. You can label
them whatever will be most useful to you. The point is that with
this system, you can work anywhere. All you’ve got to do is
whip that accordion file out and you’ve got all your stuff
organized in one place.
Another pointer for working in a small space is to keep it neat
and uncluttered. If your space is cluttered, trust me, the procrastination
fairy will order you to forget about writing right now and clean
it up. Can’t possibly write with a mess like that staring
you in the face. Clutter causes stress.
Lighting – Assuming you are working on a computer, be careful
to position your monitor to avoid glare on the screen. This will
cut down on eye strain. Watch out for windows and mirrors behind
you that will reflect excess light onto the screen.
Positioning – Your monitor should be 1½ to 2 feet
from your face and as close to eye level as possible so that you
don’t have to lift or lower your chin, and thus end up straining
your neck. A pillow for low back support helps keep you from slumping
at the desk. (Slumping makes it difficult to take those nice, deep
breaths that continually replenish the oxygen in your blood and
keep you wide-awake and alert.) Resting your feet on a foot stool
is also good for your lower back.
Move Around! – I used to force myself to stay in the chair
until the pages were written, but now I get up and take a ten-to-fifteen
minute break each hour to move around and stretch a bit. This has
aided my productivity a great deal. If my energy level is flagging,
it gives me enough time to crank the tunes that help to get me psyched
up again. If I hear “Play That Funky Music, White Boy,”
then, sister, you better look out. I have been known to dance around
with my dog while listening to said tunes (ok, you can quit laughing
now) and this boosts my mood, reminds me to have fun with my work,
and gets me jazzed to jump in for another hour.
By the way, a really good stretch to avoid Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
is to take your fingers with your opposite hand and bend them back
slowly to get a nice pull in the front of your wrist. Keep those
joints healthy!
Drink Plenty of Water – You already know this.
Rest — If you can’t keep your eyes open, go take a
nap, for goodness sake, or at least take a short walk to get your
blood moving. Most people have no idea how draining writing fiction
is; it sucks out huge amounts of your mental and emotional energy.
If you don’t watch it, you can soon find yourself ‘running
on fumes’ as they say, and the next step after that is burnout.
Novels are more marathon than sprint, so you need to pace yourself.
Some days we have more energy than others. I know that as dedicated
as many of us are, it’s tempting to force ourselves to do
more than we can, but try to be nice to yourself. Your muse will
thank you. Forced writing usually isn’t good. It takes forever,
and if you would just take care of yourself and rest for a while,
you can usually come back and finish the same amount of work in
half the time than when you’re exhausted. Trust me.
Tools at Your Desk.
Equip yourself for success. I know writers have no money, but buy
these things, at least, so that you can write well. At bare minimum,
a writer needs to have:
*Dictionary (Get one with the dates of words’ first documented
usage, if you want to write historicals. I use the Merriam-Webster
10th edition. Also recommended, the Oxford English Dictionary affectionately
known as the OED.)
*Thesaurus (please don’t rely on the one programmed into
your computer)
*Style Guide (such as the Chicago Manual of Style or at least the
little Strunk and White’s to consult when confusion arises)
*Baby Name Book (at least one, for naming characters)
*Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer
*Plenty of pens and notebooks, note cards, a calendar (on which
you’ll write your own self-appointed mini-deadlines as you
work to get the whole novel written).
Extras:
I like big whiteboards and I have them all over my office walls.
They offer a tremendous amount of space on which to plot, because
I need to be able to see the whole progression of the story at one
glance. The downside is that they are very reflective and throw
glare onto my computer screen at certain hours of the day when the
sun hits them.
Writing software. This is not an area of expertise for me, but
there are certainly a lot of programs to choose from, is you think
they might work for you. I have tried Dramatica Pro, but the bottom
line for me was that filling out all the innumerable little screens
and answering the multitude of questions was a big waste of time.
That’s just me. I’m a right-brained kind of gal. Most
programs have a Demo that you can download to see if you like it
before you purchase. I will say I’ve heard really good things
about WriteWay Pro.
Avoiding Visual Distractions.
Visual distractions can be either positive or negative. I used
to have a view of a beautiful horse farm from my office, but I had
to switch rooms because too often my gaze would wander out the window
to where the horses would be cantering across the rise. They are
so beautiful, those pure-blooded Arabians, that they would just
mesmerize me. And the foals every spring racing around on their
wobbly new legs—! Too adorable. The light was too strong in
the morning and made the office sweltering by noontime, so I had
to switch to the other side of the house.
But when I switched, I ran into a new distraction. I had set up
my bookshelves across from my desk and every time I looked past
the screen, I was presented with a wall of romance books, particularly
the “keeper” shelf, with the best of the best, my favorite
books by the finest authors that I was sure in my more insecure
moments (oh, sure, I get those, too!) were so, so, so much more
talented than I. I had to move those books. They were making me
batty.
It might seem like a small thing, but what does your gaze come
upon when it wanders away from the computer screen in between sentences?
Is it something that triggers you to feel anxious, doubtful about
your own ability, overwhelmed, or in any way stressed? If so, it
qualifies as a distraction and should be removed. Feel free to replace
it with something that encourages and inspires you. I suggest a
large photo of Sean Bean. *g* (Viggo Mortensen is acceptable, as
well.)
Dealing With Noise.
If you are faced with the distressing prospect of trying to write
in a noisy environment, you have my sincere sympathies, but do not
despair. The solution is to create your own noise to drown it out.
You’re going to need some headphones. On the other end of
those headphones, you can play period music while writing your historical
or perhaps nice instrumental jazz as background music for your contemporary
or sassy chick lit.
If the music simply creates more of a distraction for you, I would
suggest buying a sound machine. I have one that’s also a digital
clock. It’s called Body Basics by Homedics. It has a radio
and a timer, but the reason I bought it is that it has six different
sounds that you can select from, with a little socket thingy where
you can plug in headphones. The sounds you can choose from are:
woodlands, spring rain, mountain stream, white noise, ocean waves,
and summer night (crickets). They’re not expensive. Mine was
about $30 and has saved my sanity on more than one occasion.
There’s always old-fashioned swimmer’s ear-plugs, too.
They’re cheap to buy and easily available at your local drugstore,
but for me, I find them uncomfortable and thus a distraction.
Using Your Sense of Smell to Help Trigger Your Creative State.
Here is a really cool tip that I learned from Harlequin author
Melissa James from Australia. (Check out her books at www.melissajames.com.)
I have to say it’s one of the coolest writing tips I have
ever received from anyone. It has to do with using smells to anchor
ourselves to our stories.
The sense of smell is famous for its ability to transport our minds
back to a particular memory. For example, if you smell cinnamon
oatmeal cookies baking, it might mentally transport you right back
to Grandma’s house and her backing them when you were a little
kid. You’re suddenly “there.” You can not only
smell the wonderful delicious odor, but you can see the room, hear
the sounds of her house, etc. One memory blossoms into a whole complex
of instantaneous remembrances.
Well, this tip involves utilizing this remarking power of smell
to zap ourselves into our story world in the same fashion, by deliberately
building up strong associations between the story you’re working
on and one particular smell. You can choose a scented candle, a
cologne, a box of herbal tea, a potpourri, a type of candy with
a distinct smell—whatever you want.
The key to making this fantastic trick work is to inhale the smell
when you’re really “on” and totally immersed in
your story. This will help your brain to make the associations between
the two, the smell and the story. Thus, the next time you want to
get deeply immersed in writing the story, a sniff of this particular
scent will help bring your mind back instantly to all those associations
connected to your characters and plot.
If you are working on more than one book at a time, Melissa suggests
having a different scent assigned to each story. It’s just
a very swift way to get yourself “in the mood” to work
on that particular book instead of having to re-read pages and pages
of what you’ve already written (and thus run the risk of being
tempted to start revising those pages for the umpteenth time, instead
of moving on to the next scene).
In closing, if you take away only one suggestion from this article,
I hope it would be to do whatever you can to reduce the stress in
your life, especially whatever stress you may have around writing,
because I can tell you from experience that really is counterproductive.
Yes, as we know, there is such a thing as “good stress,”
termed “eustress,” but in this world, unfortunately,
it seems like so many of us live our lives racing around at top
speed, barely able to keep up with all that we have to do, compromising
our health, and making ourselves nuts. Too much stress shuts down
creativity.
Published authors have deadline stress and angst over all the numerous
things we can’t control, like sales figures and reviews. But,
as many people fail to understand, the not-yet-published also frequently
suffer major amounts of stress about their writing, the stress that
is generated by aiming at any difficult goal.
Striving to do anything really well is stressful because that means
you’re pushing yourself. You’re not one of the people
who’s just sitting around like a lump complaining about life,
you’re doing something meaningful, taking risks, and working
toward the noble goal creating a thing of beauty. That is wonderful!
You should be proud of your dedication to excellence and your own
noble desire to add something beautiful to the world, but we all
need to learn to recognize when we might be pushing too hard. Doing
so for too long of a period leads to discouragement and burn-out,
as I mentioned earlier. It’s extremely common in our field.
So, look for small, simple strategies that will help you remember
to ENJOY writing instead of stressing out over it. Fill your writing
environment with small pleasures to remind you that this is supposed
to be fun, and it’s all about inspiration—getting from
jaw-clenched discipline to joyous creative flow. If you’re
sitting there battling against your manuscript, gnashing your teeth
over how ‘awful’ it is, you’ll exhaust and demoralize
yourself rather quickly.
When you enjoy writing and have the tools you need on hand, your
output will actually be of better quality and will exude higher,
more joyful energy, and that is far more likely inspire your reader,
and that’s where success as a writer begins.
Until next time,
Gaelen
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