Ah the first week of the new year. Perhaps you are one of the people out there who added this is the year I finally write that book on your resolutions list. Or maybe you kept it vague with, I want to write more this year. Whether you are working on a novel you have always wanted to write, focusing on writing small articles or even just taking the time to write down a few key memories to pass down to family and friends, here are five ways to encourage yourself to actually get going on that goal.
1- Set a schedule.
I know, this can seem a bit spooky for those of you who don’t like to plan or who aren’t certain how to get started. But we will take it easy. Think of it like setting a doctor’s appointment. Put it on your schedule. Mark it down on the calendar (whether it is a paper or an electronic one) and treat it like you would an appointment you booked. Tell yourself there is even a cancellation fee if you need to. If you skip this appointment you need to pay yourself five dollars. It can go into a jar if you have cash or it could just be that you transfer it from checking to savings if that works better. However you want to work it (even if you don’t want to use money, find a substitute ‘cancellation fee’) make cancelling that appointment have a consequence.
2- Be honest and realistic with your time.
This goes along with setting a schedule, I know, but it is important. If you know finding one hour to write each day is going to be hard, maybe look at your schedule and realize that this week may only have one day a week where you have the time to schedule an hour. Adding this into your schedule shouldn’t be something you make hard for yourself. If it is something hard that you have to force yourself to do, eventually you will want to stop doing it, so don’t put roadblocks in your own path, make it easy on yourself.
Some people like to look at a year long calendar, others a month long one and some do this weekly. I kind of do all three. I will set a project I want to do over the course of a year. And then I will look at my monthly calendar and schedule time to work on it, but then every Sunday I sit down to look at the week ahead to see if anything needs to be shuffled about. Things come up. That is just the way life works. You can craft a beautiful plan and then find yourself dealing with a tree that fell on your yard or a leaky pipe. (Or one of a million other things especially if your schedule intersects with those of others. You may plan your month but then someone else may need you to do something you hadn’t planned for).
Looking at the schedule in the beginning of the week can help with those little things that crop up. But the larger calendars have value too. Maybe this week you only had one day to write when you wanted three. It can feel like a disappointment and it can discourage you. Having that one day was still progress. If you mark it down on your calendar the days you actually write, you can look back at the month or year and see the days you worked. Which will be more than if you didn’t do anything. And they start to add up. I know that once I see them start to add up and see how much I managed to do in the little time I marked off, I get encouraged to try and make sure I schedule more, which is sometimes more of a push to lock down that schedule for me. Figure out which method encourages you the most and work with it.
3- Never stop writing at the end of a thought.
I know it is really easy to say, let me just finish this and I will be done with this scene, this memory, this chapter. Resist the urge. If you are finishing a chapter then before you stop writing for the day, write down the first sentence of the next chapter. If you have an idea you don’t want to loose, jot down a few bullet points to read over before you start the next time you sit down, whether it is in the text or on a separate note.
It is often much easier to pick up mid thought or scene than it is to restart once you have reached the end of things. You do not waste the first few minutes thinking, okay I finished that bit, where do I go now? You have already marked where you are going, you just need to read that sentence or those bullet points and continue the thought. If you are writing separate things like articles or memories then once finished with the one you are writing, add the topic of your next article or list the next memory you want to start with as well as a few notable points to jumpstart your next scheduled session.
It isn’t set in stone. You may come back and think, oh no I want to go with X now and circle back to Y later. But even that will still get you going. Having that launch point dims the fear of the blank page stretching out before you. So don’t stop your writing at the end, add just a little bit past the end.
4- Have a bullet point list
Some of you out there may like outlines. You may adore outlines and would never think of starting without a well crafted one. Others may like to fly by the seat of your pants and just sit down and see what comes out as you get to work on your idea. Oddly enough I alternate. I love an outline when thinking through my story. What I write almost never matches my actual outline as things occur to me when I write. I do find making them helps me think through my idea so I like them even if I often fly by the seat of my pants.
The trick I use the most when writing is a bullet point list of upcoming things. A to do list for my characters. I will start with a list of bullet points that need to be in the story somewhere in the start and then at the end of my writing time, I will jot off a few bullet points I need to remember when I next sit down to write. I read them over just before I start writing the next time.
And I continue this process throughout the whole time. I find a really cheap spiralbound notebook works well for this. Post it notes and scraps of paper can get lost and with the notebook I can always flip back to past lists. I make a fresh list each time, even if the old list has points I missed. I re write them and I also draw lines through the ones I covered. Sometimes I will find if I migrate a point I want to make through five lists that the reason I haven’t added it is because while a good thought, it doesn’t belong in this story. It can also serve as a reminder to go back in and add it when I reach the editing stage and flip through the bullet points lists to see what I didn’t mark off. It can keep you on track without an elaborate outline and help you jump back into your writing more easily.
5- Names and Places Lists
I find it incredibly helpful to make a list of character names and places. Often I will have a working notebook for a story or set of stories I am working on. The first page is where I put these names and places. The reason is that while I will usually have thought of the main character’s names before I start and know those well, other names will crop up as I write. If I have a place to jot them down, I will not have to scroll back through everything I have done looking for the first name of the neighbor’s mother in law who I mentioned in passing in chapter one but somehow became a bit more important in chapter eight.
So some of my notes look like – Marie, mother of Charles who lives in the house to the right of the main character. There are also un named characters listed on this page. If I mentioned the mailman in the story, but didn’t give him a name, I will list mailman in my notes and just have a dash next to it to remind myself that I did not give the mailman a name. Perhaps it will come up later, perhaps it will not matter and the postman will never appear again and thus never need a name. I do know I have spent far too much time looking through previous chapters knowing I mentioned someone, but unable to remember if I gave them a name and if so what that name was. So I put them on the list.
I do the same with place names as well. Often I make a list of place names before I start. That way I don’t have to stop mid sentence while my brain tries to find an appropriate name for a small mountain town where the spa is located. These will sometimes change as I write, but starting with a list of place names can help keep you from derailing yourself. It isn’t set in stone and can be changed. But I find if I think about the names earlier, then when I get writing and start to put in the name I came up with, that is the time I find a better one. Things are easily crossed out and changed.
It is a much easier process than staring at the screen or page wondering how towns in this particular region of the world being created even got their names. I will also add that sometimes I will come across places that need names that I didn’t think about before. I will have the name of a town where my characters are going to pick up something from a specialty store and I will feel quite clever for naming the town and even the specialty store in advance.
Then they will get the characters to the town and they will decide they are hungry and I will have no names for restaurants. When this happens I will often write something like LUNCH RESTAURANT in all caps in the text so I don’t have to stop and think too much about the restaurant and then highlight the all caps so it is really easy to find later. In my notebook, I’ll write – lunch restaurant need name – on my place names list. It is a simple thing, but I find it really helps keep me from derailing myself.
And there we have if a list of five simple tricks to help encourage yourself to get writing and keep writing. Whatever you are working on in the new year (and beyond) I hope this helps you reach your goal.
Ten til Midnight 