Continuing the series on
Where, When and What Tools, here’s the second entry on When to Write. Finding the right time to write can be challenging. Try this list to get you started.

When to Write

• get up an hour earlier in the morning
• go to bed an hour later
• on your lunch break
• on your smoke break (who says you have to smoke to take a five minute break?)
• right before leaving work to go home
• right when you arrive home from work
• before you leave for work
• during a boring meeting (only recommended if no one will notice your inattention)
• while cooking dinner
• while eating (any meal will do)
• while commuting (use a voice recorder if you’re driving – Safety First!)
• while walking the dog
• while walking on the treadmill
• in the afternoon
• when it rains
• when the sun shines
• during an appointment you made with yourself
• while standing in line
• while “on hold”
• during TV commercials
• in the drive-thru line
• during a sporting event
• while waiting for the laundry to get done
• while the children nap
• while the children are at school
• during your spouse’s favorite TV show (you know… the one you hate)

When do you write?

Part of a series…
Where Do You Write?
When Do You Write?
What Tools Do You Write With?

Having the right combination of place, time and tools will help a writer in three ways:

1. It will help him get more writing done, because everything feels right.
2. It will help him feel good about writing… which will keep him coming back to the story.
3. It will help him have more good days than bad days. (Yes, there are bad writing days. We’ve all been there.)

So how do you find the right combination of these three elements for yourself? Trial and error is the best way to find what works for you. Here’s a list of places to get you started on finding the right place for you.

Where to Write

• at a desk
• on the couch
• under a tree
• in a museum
• in a coffee shop or cafe
• in a parked car
• in the library
• at a bus station
• at your grandma’s house during a family gathering
• at an airport
• in a park
• on a bus
• at the kitchen table
• in a shopping mall’s food court
• on a plane
• in the bathtub
• in a hotel lobby
• in a bookstore with comfy chairs
• on a train
• in the school or office cafeteria
• on a ferry
• in a shed made over into an office
• in a room with no view
• in a room with a great view
• in a hotel room
• standing up
• lying down
• in a closet
• in an art gallery
• on the floor
• in a doctor’s waiting room (change the ‘a’ to an ‘r’ and it becomes “writing room”)

Where do you write?

Part of a series…
Where Do You Write?
When Do You Write?
What Tools Do You Write With?

When you’re deep in the middle of your manuscript, the last thing you want is a writing slump. Here are four ways to prevent a slump from hitting:

1. Work the same hours every day. The routine will keep your brain primed and focused on your story.
2. Stop writing each day at a point where you know what the next sentence will be. If you already know what you’re going to write next, you’re less apt to hit a slump.
3. Read over the last few pages of what you wrote the day before to get yourself back into the swing of the story.
4. Retype the last page or two that you wrote the day before to put yourself back in the story.

What other methods do you use to keep your momentum going?

I mentioned Shrinking Violet Promotions the other day. As Christmas approaches, they’re doing a wonderful series on the Twelve Days of Christmas-Introvert Style. They’re up to Day 5 with an inspiring post each day and a giveaway.

If you’re feeling people-challenged this holiday season, visit Shrinking Violet Promotions to pick up some helpful suggestions for surviving the holidays while keeping up with your writing. And throw your name in the hat for the great giveaways!

It’s December again and besides the rush of holiday buying, it’s also time to begin planning for 2009. What do you plan to accomplish in 2009 that will further your writing?

What did you accomplish in 2008?

Start by jotting down some notes on what you did this year.

Write down where you are at in the following areas:

• Inventory – How many stories or novels do you have on hand? What’s the status of each? Working on rough draft? Rough draft done? In revision stage? Polished version completed?
• Submitting – How many stories or novels did you send out last year? What’s the status of each? Heard back from the publisher? Time to send a follow-up note?
• Marketing – Do you have a marketing plan to connect with your readers? Do you have a website or blog? Do you have an email list of interested readers?

What do you want to accomplish in 2009?

Once you know where you are are, take those same notes and decide where you want to be in 2009. What do you need to do, acquire, or learn to get to that point?

Write out your 2009 plan and keep it handy

Write it down and keep it in your purse, post it at your desk, tape it to the bathroom mirror. Keep it in front of you, so you are always thinking about it. Constant attention to your goals will help you achieve them.

Review your plan regularly

I recommend reviewing your plan at least once a month, but once a week is better. Follow the same format and look at Inventory, Submitting, and Marketing. Where are you at right now? Where do you want to be? What do you need to do this week to get there?

Other Resources

What are your writing goals for 2009?

Goal Setting Strategies

8 Steps to Setting (and Achieving) Goals for Writers

What goals have you set for your writing in 2009?

For more encouragement in building your inventory, take a look at Ray Bradbury’s record. He’s written a story a week, on average, since he was 12 years old. He started writing in 1932. Doing the math, that’s nearly 4000 stories. That’s a lot of inventory. And Ray sent those stories out to magazine editors, many before they were any good, as he later learned. But he kept on writing and he kept on sending them out.

He writes 1000-2000 words a day, every day, even now, though he has switched to dictating his stories to his daughter over the phone.

His advice to writers:

…stop being an intellect. Get your work done. Don’t worry about what you’re doing. Don’t plan anything. Just do it. Throw it up. Throw it up, and then clean up. I was at a bookstore last night and a book clerk there said, ‘I’m having trouble with a novel I’m writing. I do this, I do that.’ I said, ‘Stop that’ — no outlines, no plans. Get your characters to write the book for you. Ahab wrote Moby Dick, Melville didn’t. Montag wrote Fahrenheit 451, I didn’t. If you let your characters live, and get out of their way, then you have a chance of creating something individual.

Can you write a story a week? A chapter a week, if you’re working on a novel? You can. Try Ray’s method… don’t think, don’t plan, just write. See where your characters take you. Get words down on the paper and then clean them up and make them sparkle.

Building your inventory of stories and novels gives you a lot of manuscripts to send out to agents and editors. But how do you work up to creating so many stories? One way is by building your writing muscles. Shannon Donnelly has written an article to help you build up those muscles for the long haul.

10 Steps to Big Writing Muscles

1. Pay attention to your body. Eat well-balanced meals, limit alcohol and caffeine so your mind stays sharp.
2. Establish a habit of “warms-up” that begin every writing session. Sit at your desk and write one page of anything.
3. Go over last five pages of your current project and do light editing.
4. Stretch yourself by writing one more page each week than you consider productive and comfortable.
5. Plan your training. If you write short stories, work your sprinting muscles by write a new short story each week. If you write novels, write every day to develop your marathon muscles.
6. Avoid writer’s block with two strategies – stop writing in mid-sentence and mid scene and no staring at the blank screen… write something, anything.
7. Pay yourself as motivation. Set your per page rate and put the money into a piggy bank to be spent after you finish your first draft and a second-draft edit.
8. Make your writing place comfortably yours with the proper furniture and equipment.
9. Ease yourself back into your training schedule after vacation or illness.
10. Take short breaks during your writing sessions.

Daily writing progress will build your writing muscles. Get started today.

If you don’t write it, you can’t sell it. Seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? But it can be easy to get caught up in the creative side of writing and forget all about the business aspects. After all, we’re writers, artists… we take our imagination and weave stories of adventure, passion, intrigue to beguile our readers. Art takes time to produce if you want a quality product.

But the word “product” is the one we have to remember. Yes, you’re telling a fabulous story to entertain and enthrall your readers. But it is also your product, the thing that you produce and, with a lot of work, some luck and the stars aligned just so, the thing that you sell.

So many of us are striving to quit our day jobs and work full-time as writers. We’ve all heard the statistics about how many achieve that. And how many don’t. If you want to support yourself as a full-time writer, you need to have stories (short or novel-length) to sell and they need to be available on a regular basis.

Quality is important in what you write, so just churning out words is not the best way to build your inventory. By focusing on completing more pieces, though, you can build your writing “muscles” and have more available to sell.

Angela Booth gives the advantages of building your writing inventory in her article Build Your Writing Inventory where she talks about building inventory for both fiction and non-fiction writers.

• Lack of pressure. There’s no pressure when you’re writing for inventory. This means you can be creative, and can take risks.
• You’ve got lots of work extant, so you can court a new market immediately, as soon as you find it. This increases the likelihood that you will get your foot in the door with a new magazine, or a new publishing house, and have your work purchased simply because you showed up when your work was needed.
• When a new market appears, it takes several months for it to register on the radar screen of writers. Once the market has been listed in a writers’ marketing guide, they’ll be flooded with work. If you can get in early, the chances of your work being purchased goes up, simply because it will be read with more care.
• You’ve always got something to sell. “Rejection” has no meaning for you. Rejection simply means that you haven’t yet found a home for a piece of work.

While you’re working on your best-seller, keep these things in mind:

1. You can’t make money as a writer without a product (i.e., novel, short story, article) to sell.
2. The more products you have, the better chance you have of selling something.

In the next few days, we’ll talk more about how you can build your inventory of writing products, so you’re ready when the right publishing opportunity comes along.

Orson Scott Card has written 61 books, including the best-selling Ender’s Game and won this year’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for his outstanding contributions to teen literature. An article in the School Library Journal mentions how he manages such tremendous output.

Two full-time assistants help Card free up time for his many activities. So does the speed with which he composes his books. “When I write, I’m very, very fast,” he says. Total typing time, as opposed to thinking time, averages five weeks per novel. “I write a story as if I were telling it to a group of people whose interest I have to hold. So I don’t have time when I’m writing to indulge myself in description or lengthy asides. But the real work, the foundational work, the structural work, the skeleton of the story—that comes before I ever set words on a piece of paper. The thinking time can be years. Very rarely have I gone from idea to finished work very quickly.”

As the writing years go by, I’m finding that I spend more time in that thinking stage, too. The novel I’m currently working on started as a short story. Then I started to think of logical events that would follow that story and I began writing it as a novel. The novel was moving along pretty well until real life events intruded, so I put it on hold for a while.

And while it has been on hold, I’ve continued to have some amazing ideas for it. Ideas that will intensify the conflict and deepen the characters. Ideas that I certainly never would have thought of if I had continued working on it and written straight through to the end. It makes me think that I might need more thinking time on my stories. Maybe I’m rushing into the writing too quickly and not allowing enough time for my subconcious to come up with unique plot twists and character conflicts.

So for now, I’m taking notes as my brain comes up with ideas and I have a feeling this story will be a lot better because of increased thinking time.

How much thinking time do you allow on your stories?

When it comes to writing your novel, there are two schools of thought:

1. Get it done and fix it later
2. Take your time and do it right the first time

Most of my life, I’ve been firmly in the second camp – agonizing over my words as I put them down, taking plenty of time to be sure a scene is right before I move on to the next. 

This method, however, has not been without problems.  I have several unfinished manuscripts languishing about.  As I painstakingly worked on each one, the passion and interest I had for each idea faded until one day I was no longer interested in working on them at all.  And now they sit, ignored and unfinished.

Recognizing this as an undesirable outcome, I find myself now leaning toward the first practice.  I wrote fast and pushed through to the end of one manuscript even though I changed the plot in the middle.  I changed it so much that the second half of the story bears no resemblance to the first half.  It will need major revisions to become a coherent novel.  But it is a finished first draft.

So my current strategy is to blaze through the first draft, no matter how crappy it comes out, just to get it done.  Then I have something that I can revise into perfection.  A completed first draft gets me one step closer to a finished final product.

So… fast vs. perfect… which method works better for you?