003: Building a Consistent Writing Practice

If you have a dream of writing a book, there's one very important thing you need to do: write! But it can be hard to find the time to write when you have fifty other things on your plate. Learn how to honestly assess your daily schedule to figure out the best writing time for you, as well as how to reframe the idea of writing time so you can fit it into your schedule.

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Building a consistent writing practice

Hi, Friends, welcome back to the podcast. This episode is coming out sometime in November. So if you are participating in NaNoWriMo, and are struggling to build a consistent writing practice, you're struggling to fit your writing into your day, you're feeling overwhelmed, you're feeling anxious, you're feeling like you just don't have enough time to write. Hopefully, this episode will help you. And if you're not participating in NaNoWriMo, or you're listening to it after November, not to worry, lots of good information in here about building a writing practice that fits your life. And is manageable, right?

The goal here, developing a writing practice is not to block off three hours of time every single day where you won't be interrupted to write. That's not what we're doing here. That's not sustainable. I can't write for three hours at a time every day, I wouldn't even want to write for three hours at a time every day. Even if I had nothing else going on. I just that would be way too much for me. And I imagine it's a lot for too much for most people. So we're talking about how to fit this into your day how to make it manageable. So one of the first things I want you to do is to take an honest look at your natural preferences. If left to your own devices, if you had your choice of when you could write in the day, when would it be? Now I know it's not going to be realistic for everyone to actually do this, maybe you like writing at 8am. That's your ideal time that you have to drop off your kids at school like I know it's not going to be possible. But just as a first step, take a second. Think of your ideal day. And think about what time of day you are most productive when you're awake when you would want to write. This is sort of another thing you can take into account as if you're a morning person or a night owl if you're a mix of both. As an example for me, I, I pretty much have to write in the morning or it's not going to get done not early morning, I get up between 6 and 6:30. So I'm not a super early morning person. I'm not like up at 4:30 in writing or anything like that. But I have to write before work or there's a 99% chance it's just it's not going to happen.

I've tried writing in the evening, after I finished working and it's just my mind is fried, I'm exhausted. I don't like staring at a computer screen in the evening. So if I take 20 minutes to write, ideally between the hours of like seven and 8:30 am. That's like my sweet spot. That's perfect. Because I have time to take my dog for a walk, I have time to get a cup of coffee, get a latte, sit down, then I write and then I feel good. And it's easier for me to write then write. I'm not overwhelmed. I'm not drained. Things just flow a little bit easier when I write in the morning. So take some time identify what time of day would be your preference. If you have nothing else going on now is where you take an honest look at your schedule. Something that I had to get really honest about for myself, is how much time I spend on social media. It is second nature to me to just pick up my phone and open up Tik Tok or open up Instagram without even realizing that I'm doing it. It's like it's just autopilot. It's almost scary how addicted I've gotten to these platforms and I'm better about it now because I'm mindful of it. I'm aware that I do it. So that helps but oh man it is. It's really hard to not just reach for my phone automatically without even thinking about it like oh, it's been an hour since I've been on social media.

Let me open up Tik Tok and see what's new, and I got into this habit of opening up Tik Tok in the morning and scrolling. During that window when I would normally be writing I also got in the habit of opening up this game that I play on my phone this freaking game and I've uninstalled it and reinstalled it multiple times because I'm so addicted to it. It's just stupid. It's like one of these little I don't know toy like it's just a dumb mindless game kind of like candy crush but not Candy Crush. You get five lives on this game. Every when I wake up in the morning, my lives are replenished and I have five lives and so I would play until I got rid of those five lives. And sometimes that would be five minutes. Sometimes it would be like 30 minutes that I would be sitting playing this game on my on my phone, and then I would look up and all of a sudden it's 8:30. I'm like, well, crap, there goes my morning.

So, the goal of this when you're getting honest with yourself, when you're looking at your day to see how you spend your time is not to beat yourself up. It's not to judge, it's just to say, Oh, interesting, I'm saying that I want to create a consistent writing practice. I'm saying that this is important to me. But yet, I'm spending my time in ways that don't necessarily reflect that. Interesting. I wonder if I can make any tweaks or adjustments to my schedule in order to spend time on the things that matter and on to spend time on the things that I'm prioritizing right now, maybe other times, you're not prioritizing, writing, and you want to use social media, you need to use it as a form of escape. That's okay, I've been there too. When I'm really anxious, sometimes I just want to like check out and I want to get on social media. So I understand it can be kind of a an escape mechanism or a coping tool or whatever. But take an honest look at your schedule, what other commitments you have, and see if there's a way to rearrange time if you can. And if you can't rearrange time, if your schedule is set, see if you can maybe cut down on something else that's not as much of a priority right now to fit in writing time. Now, this next part is important because when I say writing time, when I say oh, you can rearrange your schedule or you know, stop scrolling Tik Tok for an hour every night and maybe write for 20 minutes. That's what I mean.

I mean writing for 20 minutes, 15 minutes, I'm not talking about a long stretch of uninterrupted time where you shut yourself in your office or shut yourself in your bedroom and close the door and write for three hours, I'm talking 15 minutes. If that you have 15 minutes to write every single day, that's freaking amazing. That's how I wrote my first book is in 15 minutes spurts sitting on the couch writing in the morning before work, it's totally possible to do once you get the momentum going, you can actually make a lot of progress in 15 minutes, assuming that you're not writing for 30 seconds and then opening up Tik Tok for 30 seconds and then going back and writing for a few minutes. And then going back on social media like focusing for 15 minutes making that commitment to yourself saying I'm just going to write for this 15 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever, you know, time length you decide. But that is part of this reframe that I think a lot of us need to do around what a writing practice is. If you have five minutes, if you have eight kids and you're running around trying to get them ready, and your days are just completely chaotic, but you really want to write a book. And it's something that's really important to you. Five minutes, if you put on headphones, put on some ambient, you know music in the background, or just try to get silence If you don't want to use music and just write as much as you can, in a five minute writing sprint, you can get a lot done that way too, I promise you.

So there's a lot more we could talk about with his consistent writing practice. But those are really the main things even if you take the time to take your preference into account, take an honest look at your schedule and other commitments you have and take an honest look about how you're spending your time. And then if you reframe this idea of a writing practice, like what this can look like, you can absolutely build a consistent writing practice in your day. One of the things I'll mention kind of as a bonus tip is you can do other things than actually write you can do other other things count as a writing practice. So if you're just taking notes on a character profile that you're doing for one of your characters, if you are editing a manuscript that counts, if you're making a voice note to yourself on your phone about an idea that you have for a scene or if you're actually dictating to your phone instead of writing it out. All of those things count as writing practice or writing routine, all of that work that you're doing is getting you to the same goal of writing a book finishing a book, drafting a book, whatever. So it's really important. Again, just reframe what this looks like. And that's that's going to help you that goes a long way to building this writing practice. And remember, it's a writing practice, right? It might never be exactly what you want it to be. Maybe you're one of those people who does want to have three hours of uninterrupted, uninterrupted time each day to write and you're like oh man, I wish I could get three hours. That'd be amazing.

If you can't get there, that's okay. Be realistic, do what you can with what you have. And try implementing the suggestions again, if you're listening to this in November and participating in NaNoWriMo, and see if this helps you make progress on your novel. And I would love to hear from you if if any of these methods help if any of these tricks help if you are getting more used to that, that habit, that routine of writing. I would love to hear about it. So let me know if this was helpful. And I will see you next week.

Thank you so much for tuning in.

Katie Wolf