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Secretly Doing NaNoWriMo for Years
Every year in November, the excitement of National Novel Writers Month(NaNoWriMo) descends upon the internet. People are drafting their outlines and busting out their copies of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. My online writer’s groups are full of the energy around writing sprints and trying to meet their word count goal for the month. Traditionally, to “win” NaNoWriMo, you need to write 50,000 words in November, which boils down to about 1700 words a day. 50,000 words stresses me out I’m a mom of four school-aged kids who works full time and doesn’t write fast. My writing goals tend to be “write for ten minutes each evening,” “publish a…
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Writing a First Novel?
Take it piece by piece I have been writing non-fiction articles and blogging for many years, so writing article-length items is normal for me. An idea for a novel-length fantasy story has been brewing in the back of my mind all these years and I have finally started putting the ideas on paper. I wondered if I would even have what it takes to write novel-length fiction. It’s so much longer than anything I’ve ever written before! I had a few false starts where I wrote one scene here and there but fizzled out. I bought myself a copy of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and did some deep-down…
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Breaking Through Resistance – 4 Simple Tips
Are you reading this when you should be writing right now? Whether it’s your next blog post, your novel or a report for work, sometimes it’s hard to get started on writing something, even when you really want to get it done. Here are some simple ways for breaking through resistance. Set a Timer to Get You Started When I want to get something on the page and it’s just not happening, I set a time for just ten minutes. For me, ten minutes sneaks past my mental block and I finally start writing. Once I am writing, usually I get into a groove and I end up working through…
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How Can I Track and Reinforce my Creative Habits?
Tracking Word Count Recently, I have been writing more frequently. I have been finding a lot of joy in tracking my word count as a measure of what I have written. There are a lot of versions of habit trackers out there. I drew one myself by sketching a picture of a tree and chopping it into boxes. I counted by 100 words for each box and I color in how much I have written. My goal was to write 10% more than what I wrote in 2020 and I blew that goal out of the water. There are probably prettier ways or more exact ways to track word count,…
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Daily Creative Habits: Vote for Who You Want to Be
I was listening to Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead podcast interviewing James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. His book talks about habit formation and he suggests we start by envisioning the type of person we want to be. For example, if you want to eat healthier, instead of focusing on the diet plan you want, he would suggest envisioning a healthy person. When you go into a restaurant and look at the menu, the prompt to yourself would be “What would a healthy person order for lunch?” This type of question will help you drill down to the types of daily choices that person would make. Habits are a vote…
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Six Tips to Manage Your Creative Works in Progress
You can do everything, but not all at once! Are you the type of person who has a variety of creative interests? If your creativity branches off in many different directions, you might have several projects going at once. Your creative goals and dreams may be overwhelming. There may be a variety of art supplies cluttering up your spare room. Nothing is getting finished! How can we keep making progress in our creative work when our creative interests send us in many different directions? 1) Get all your ideas down in one place The first step to organizing your creative impulses is to get all your ideas down in one…
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Big Picture, Small Steps: What if I’m overwhelmed thinking about my goals?
When you read about goal setting, people suggest you visualize what achieving the goal would look like. You write about your ideal day or make a vision board. All of these activities help you lay out what you would like to do in so much detail you can taste it. But what if step one is incredibly far from the vision in your head – like comically far away? It can be overwhelming and create resistance toward even getting started down the path to achieving your goals. Where do you start? Here are a few steps to keep in mind. 1) Find your next step and focus on that Life…