A while ago I talked about my 3 Rules for Writing in a Time of Distraction, which I continue to employ to great effect.

Now, as I drive toward ever-encroaching deadlines during busy days filled with day jobbery, family life, and a magnitude of other distractions, the little time I have to write must be focused and not wasted. Few things are more frustrating than finally sitting down to write and not–and not because of distraction, but because you’re not ready or in the right headspace.

I ran into that wall of frustration numerous times until I figured out how to blow through it. I rarely slam against that wall now, especially when I follow my 3 simple tricks for powering through a first draft.

I’ll share them with you in hopes that they lend even a fraction of the benefits they’ve given me:

• Review and revise last 5-10 pages of draft. Simple yet effective for catapulting yourself into the headspace you need for new words. Every time I sit down to write, I go back 5-10 pages and read and revise to the point of where I’d stopped in my previous session.  Not only does it get you in the right frame of mind, including the current POVs voice, but it lends to a tighter first draft on the sentence level as you’re constantly revising and tweaking your work as you go. It also gets you ready to start dropping words the second you hit whitespace, because you now:

• End your writing session mid-sentence. This sounds like an odd thing to do, but when it comes time start writing I find it much easier to pick up where I left off if I stopped mid-sentence. If you stop at the end of a section or chapter or paragraph, a lot of the time your flow of consciousness will have been severed if you come back to that point and try to pick it up again. If you stop mid-sentence, I find it much easier to launch back into that stream, especially if you’ve already reviewed and revised the previous 5-10 pages of draft. Try it,  you may like it.

• Stew, think, plot, obsess. When I’m not actively writing, I’m thinking about writing. It sounds obvious, and it is, but it’s the quality of thinking that counts. I especially find monotonous actions work well in mentally transporting me back into my work-in-progress. Things like washing the dishes, mowing the lawn, driving to and from the day jobbe, and of course–one of my all-time favorites–taking a long, hot shower. Like a pro golfer envisions his next shot, or a football QB thinks about executing the next play before it happens, I plot out the next chapter, the next section, character interactions, worldbuilding, whatever I’m about to tackle in my next writing session. That way, when I’ve reviewed and revised the last 5-10 pages, and I’ve ended my writing session mid-sentence, when I hit that whitespace my writing engine is firing on all cylinders–and BOOM, down go the words.

Some of these may seem obvious, others may not. They may work for you, they may not.

But these 3 simple tricks help me power through first drafts. Maybe they’ll help you too.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 11:24 am and is filed under On Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.