Category: Learning curve

Posts in which I discuss things I’ve learned or need to learn about any of many topics.

In This Instance, Shorter Is Better

Lynn

I’m a bit frustrated with the 15 minute sessions, because although I should be able to make them work, they’re not working. Could be the part I’m writing in my book, or just the usual I can’t quite hold my attention on my writing for the required length of time thing.

I’m willing to bet hot chocolate on the latter, and popsicles on the former. :D

Whatever the cause, the outcome is the same. Few words, and not enough progress.

So, it’s back to the 5 minute sessions for the rest of the book and maybe a trial run with the 15 minute sessions when I’m back at work on one of my other books.

I might update later with a comparison of my output with the two session lengths.

UPDATE:

I can’t really tell a difference in speed, although there is a difference in output between the two days I switched. I averaged 677 wph the day I used 15 minute sessions and 816 the day I used 5 minute sessions, which seems like a difference, but when I look several days back, I have slow days using the 5 minute sessions too, where my speed is anywhere from 300 to 600 wph. The biggest difference is that I wrote for a longer period of time with the 5 minute sessions and definitely ended with a better word count for the day. But truly, I don’t know if that’s because of session length or some other reason, because I’m on a deadline and I’m feeling the pressure to spend more time writing.

What I do know is that my ideal work day would be to sit and write because it’s just something I do each morning until I hit my word count and not have to track these metrics. If I could be confident I could sit down and write my word count every day in a reasonable amount of time, I really wouldn’t care what my words per hour and my daily average amounted to.

(Rare days off would be okay, but they tend to balloon into more off days than on if I don’t monitor like a hawk. Even after 87-ish days of writing every day, I still have that moment where I think, Oh crap. Did I write yesterday? I noticed it most when I was working on publishing my last book, but when my attention’s on something, I can become single-minded to the nth degree.)

I could easily set production goals based around daily word count goals and ignore time altogether, with the basic assumption that this or that word count goal is reasonable for me.

Ah well. I’ll figure something out. :o I don’t give up easily when I really want something and that’s the kind of writers’ life I want.

Writing In 15 Minute Sessions

Lynn

I’m trying out a new writing method now that I’ve finally got back into the swing of things. I’m finding the 5 minute sessions a little annoying the last few days so I’ve reverted to 15 minute sessions. I’m trying to do 3 every hour, and hit 800 words. I haven’t done it yet, but I do think I can so I’m going to practice that for a while.

What I’m hoping to gain is the ability to write more—of course. :D Say, 5 to 7 hours a day at 800 words each… That would be a pretty nice output by anyone’s standards! I’d get 15 minutes to recharge every hour. Yep. I’m liking this idea a lot and I’m optimistic I can make it work for a while. :D

I’ll report back later today with some numbers to see if this thing’s working out.

UPDATE:  I liked it. I had trouble meeting the 800 words goal (267 per session) but I think I just need to keep practicing. All told, here are my results:

session 1 – 3 sprints – 543 words
session 2 – 3 sprints – 481 words
session 3 – 3 sprints – 423 words
session 4 – 3 sprints – 521 words

I came up 1,232 short of where I would’ve been if I’d managed the 800. Still, I did like this way of working! It was a nice change from the mad pace of the 5 minute sessions and I’m hopeful I can train my brain to hit 300 in 15 minutes. ;)

I’m calling it a success and worth further experimentation. :D

Are the five minute sessions changing the way I write?

Lynn

Well, I have to say this book started out with a lot more promise. :D At the moment, I’m feeling iffy about the through-plot—not sure I have one—and I’m also very worried about what the five minute sessions are going to do to my writing as a whole.

I’ve done several experiments lately where I’ve tried setting the timer for longer periods of time (forty minutes and fifty minutes specifically, because they match the amount of time I usually end up with when I do the five minute sessions for an hour) but I can’t reach the same speeds, not even close. The best I’ve done was 477 words in fifty minutes. That’s about half the speed I often reach when I’m writing in the five minute sessions.

I think it comes down to focus and how I’m able to stay better focused with a five minute timer versus a longer timer. I just can’t seem to hold my attention to one specific task for much longer than the five minutes. And if that isn’t the reason, then I’m stumped. I have no idea what else could make such a difference.

This all matters because I haven’t had a chance to just sit down and read what I’ve written lately and I have no idea how the pacing of this book is going. My scenes have shortened. I didn’t mean for that to happen, and it might not be a difference in my writing but a difference in this specific story, so I’m not going to judge that just yet. Still worrying about it though.

I need a title for this book; I need to figure out where I’m going; and I need to figure out if there’s a decent story here.

Yikes!

One thing I’ve absolutely learned with all this is that even five minutes is more than enough time to sit down and write something.

Whether or not that something is any good is yet to be determined. :D

New Chair Woes

Lynn

I love my new chair. You know, this one:

New Chair

But…

The new chair’s interfering with my ability to focus while I write, and I’m sure of it. A new chair means comfort. Apparently comfort means less writing.

This breaks my heart. I thought I was going to increase my productivity if I made my stints at my workspace more comfortable, but it’s had the opposite effect.

The problem could be anything from an incorrect height adjustment (I’ve tried many, many adjustments over the last week seeking the perfect height—if there is one, it eludes me), to a wholly psychological issue. Don’t know and don’t care at this point. I just need to feel right when I’m sitting at my desk so I can write. And I haven’t felt right since I moved that chair in here.

So, back to the spindle-back dining room chair, like the one you see here:

Desk

Ah well. I can still use the new chair when I’m not working, so all’s not lost.

Remember This: Don’t Rewrite!

Lynn

So I’m staring at a passage in one of my books that I need to get right so I can figure out where the hell to go next with this thing and I’ve just realized that I’ve spent about 3 hours on it.

It’s a passage of only about 1,600 words and I’ve cycled through it, rewriting, more times than I want to think about.

I keep reworking it, mainly I think to give myself a jumping off spot for what happens next, but I still don’t know what that might be.

I’m now trying to decide if anything I’ve done has made any difference whatsoever to the passage, but I can’t tell. There’s a part of me that’s very afraid I’ve screwed this up. But there’s a part of me that knew last night that I needed to soften one of my characters and the only other choice was to scrap what I had and just rewrite the scene from scratch.

Which is exactly what I should have done, and I don’t know why I keep forgetting that. Rewriting is time consuming and rarely does more than make me crazy. The story needs to be written fresh, not pieced together from scraps already on the page. And yet that’s exactly what I’ve just done. And I can tell you now, those 3 hours of writing would have gotten me at least the 1,600 words I have now, so chopping the 1,600 wouldn’t have been a big deal in the end. In fact, I would probably have more done now than I have if I’d just chopped the passage and started fresh.

I need to remember this. I NEED TO REMEMBER THIS.

Maybe that’ll help. ;)

Planning for a Higher Daily Word Count—Take 2

Lynn

So, my planning for a higher daily word count post is a good idea. Only problem? I’ve had a few thoughts since then—I mean, that was like, what, six whole days ago? ;)

It’s a good plan, to be honest. I’ve just made a few tweaks and I thought I’m bring it up here again to help solidify the plan in my head before the week starts over tomorrow.

I’m behind my August goal, which is simply to maintain a 3,000 word a day average for the month. I haven’t made it to 3k words once since the 1st. Bummer, that. But that’s also part of the change, so let me just get to the re-planned plan here.

Instead of a goal of 3,000 a day, I’ve revised my goal to 2,464 words per day until the end of the year, which is the word count I actually need to average daily to write the books I’d like to write before December 31.

What was the point in pushing for a word count higher than what I really need? I decided there wasn’t one.

On the other hand, I would actually like to try to get ahead this month by averaging slightly higher than that minimum, but I decided there was no point forcing myself to do more than I have to on the days when writing isn’t going so well. Why add stress for no real reason?

I’m still going to stick to trying to get in four blocks of 725 words each and use the 5 minute sessions to do it. That should give me some leeway to reach slightly higher word counts this month, or at least allow for some slow sessions without it meaning I have to squeeze in more sessions.

Now, I’ve got to get to writing today, because so far, I’ve been doing everything I can NOT to write. :D Just one of those days where nothing is good enough and everything is a distraction!

Planning for a Higher Daily Word Count

Lynn

For the next month or so, I’d like to start averaging around 3,000 words a day. I have deadlines that I’d really like to get ahead of if I can.

To do that, I’m going to need a plan. My experiments with the 5 minute sessions have proved to be very helpful with both focus and speed so I’m hoping I can increase my daily word counts by creating a daily plan based around them. Nothing so specific as a daily schedule because I am not going there again. :D

A general plan will let me set each day up however I need.

Hour 1
Hour 2
Hour 3
Hour 4

For each hour I have a goal of reaching 750 words. To start with I’m going to do ten 5 minute sessions per hour, with a goal of maintaining an average of 75 words for those 5 minute sessions. As long as I can stick to those goals, I can reach 3,000 words each day.

This is also today’s plan.

Hour 1 (did 8 sessions, reached 313 words, and yeah, I just deleted another chunk because this book is dragging right now and I can’t get any momentum going, also went over my hour)
Hour 2 (cancelled)
Hour 3 (cancelled)
Hour 4 (cancelled)

This is easier to type than the actual times I plan to do the writing, but I do have them scheduled just as I did in my previous planning posts. First hour starts at 3:30 p.m. See ya!

From 3:45 until now, I’ve reached 490 words. I couldn’t stop fixing stuff and never actually did but 2 sessions in that entire time because I kept getting distracted so…yeah. I’m just going to call that editing and move on.

Hour 1 to start shortly after a break.

Later…

Okay, today’s writing turned into a mess and I’m not sure how to prevent these kinds of days from happening, or if I can.

(1) My critical brain kicked in and that accounted for a lot of the time. Nothing I wrote was good enough. (2) I couldn’t get any momentum going because I couldn’t settle on a “next move” for the story. (3) The story wasn’t flowing, so when I tried to write I was constantly deleting, and again, no momentum.

All those have overlap with each other, of course, but that’s the best I can come up with for why things just wouldn’t move along tonight.

Honestly, I should have switched stories before it got so late that I’m now going to have to end the night with less than a third of the word count I needed today. I’m sitting at a net increase of 804 words, and they’re all on one novel (the one I’m supposed to publish in August).

Since I’d like to have a better day tomorrow, I’m not stopping tonight until I fix whatever’s wrong and start something that I can pick up and run with tomorrow.

A Dilemma

Lynn

Faster writing, possibly more motivated writing (could be wrong, could be that I just finally got myself started again), definitely more typos, and definitely not as enamored of my own stuff as I should be when I re-read.

However, I was having an issue with that last item even before I started the 5 minute sessions, so maybe that’s not a result of the 5 minute sessions at all.

The mistakes? Definitely, absolutely, a result of the 5 minute sessions. I’m not taking time between each of them to tidy up when I’ve just written, which is exactly what I started out doing and should have kept doing but didn’t.

I just don’t know if I’m going to be able to work like this for an entire book. Part of me wants to keep it up, and part of me wants to go back to trying 1 hour blocks of a more leisurely nature so I can make sure what I’m writing satisfies me.

So, as mentioned, I have a dilemma, and I can’t decide what to do.

I said recently that I was going to try to make faster decisions, so … time to decide.

Before I set aside the 5 minute sessions, I should make a real effort to take the time between sessions to go over what I just wrote and correct any mistakes. Or, better yet, I should do it in the first few minutes of the my next hour long block I have planned, right before I start writing again as long as I can keep it short so it doesn’t take more than 5 to 10 minutes. Can I go over 800ish words in 5 to 10 minutes? Surely I can do that.

Alright then, that’s settled. Time to get to work. I’m starting about an hour and a half later than I’d planned to start today.

Later…

So that didn’t work. At all. I’ll have to rethink this. I spent nearly my entire first hour on the read through and fixes. I don’t know if I’m just in a really critical frame of mind or if every book I’ve written since January just really, really sucks.

I’m leaning toward the former, but maybe I should revisit one of my previous works just to see…

Truthfully, that isn’t likely to help and I’d like to stop needed that kind of reassurance from myself! :o

Anyway, gotta get to work or I’m going to end up with another day where I do the bare minimum, and I don’t want that.

Sprintless Writing

Lynn

I wanted to write today without sprinting, but I see the problem I run into now. I continue to get distracted. This is writing time and yet I was on the forums again, checking reports, fiddling with my laptop battery and settings, and checking the weather for the tenth time this morning (seriously).

I think I might need to use a timer even for the leisurely read throughs I want to do today to find and fix errors and catch myself up in the three novels I’m working on.

Hmm. Something to think about.

I need some decaf.

Also, I’m about half a day away from just giving in and buying some regular coffee next time at the store. Yikes. I must resist.

Plan for Another 5,000 Word Day

Lynn

Gonna have to post my plan today, otherwise I’m probably not going to get started. It’s just one of those days.

And since I still need to practice writing more each day because I want to be more prolific in the coming months and years, I would like a few more 5,000 word days this month if I can manage them. I would like to know if I can write 5,000 on demand using almost the same plan that got me 5,000 words on Monday. And that’s the reason for today’s experiment.

The Plan

11:20–12:20 (finished at 12:20, did 5 sessions, reached 341 words) (ouch! writing’s going slow and I keep forgetting to reset the timer today, no idea why)
12:30–1:30 (started late, finished late, did 7 sessions, reached 471 words) (no idea what’s slowing me down, other than general sluggishness, seems I’ve got no pep today!)
4:40–5:40 (finished at 5:49, did 9 sessions, reached 703 words) (better, but still too slow)
6:20–7:20 (finished at 7:18, did 5 sessions, reached 433 words)
7:30–8:30 (cancelled)
8:40–9:40 (cancelled)
9:50–10:50 (cancelled)

For each hour I have a goal of reaching 725 words. To start with I’m going to do ten 5 minute sessions per hour, with a goal of maintaining an average of 73 words for those 5 minute sessions.

Now, off to get started. I have 4 minutes to make a fresh cup of tea. :)

I’ve had to make an adjustment to my start times for the remaining sessions. I’m not sure how I’ll fare trying for 5 hour sessions in a row, but we’ll see.

I cancelled my final three hours. I’m at 2,015. I might write more later tonight, but for the moment, I’m done.

A Plan for a 5,000 Word Day (Success!)

Lynn

So I made some detailed plans this morning on how to get to 5,000 words today.

There are a lot of things I need to practice if I’m going to up my game and be more prolific in the coming months and years. I won’t always need days like this, but I would like to have a few of them occasionally, and I would like to know if breaking the goal down into much, much smaller bits will help or hinder me. And that’s the reason for today’s experiment.

The Plan

10:40–11:40 (finished on time, did 8 sessions, reached 806 words)
11:50–12:50 (finished at 12:42, did 8 sessions, reached 809 words)
1:00–2:00 (finished at 2:11, did 9 sessions, reached 797 words)
4:00–5:00 (finished at 5:05, did 8 sessions, reached 495 words) (my momentum was shot after my break and I just ran out of time to recover)
6:10–7:10 (finished on time, did 9 sessions, reached 841 words) (also I switched to work on a different story)
7:20–8:20 (finished on time, did 8 sessions, reached 817 words) (only 435 to go!)
8:30–9:30 (finished at 9:07, did 5 sessions, reached 527 words) (holy crap, I did it!)

For each hour I have a goal of reaching 725 words. To start with I’m going to do ten 5 minute sessions per hour, with a goal of maintaining an average of 73 words for those 5 minute sessions.

If that works out well, I would also like to try focused writing for an hour at a time, where my goal remains to keep my fingers moving and the words flowing.

Well, time’s here to get started, so I’ll update at the end of my first hour or my first 725 words.

Also, I needed to take some extra time after 5:00, so I made a bit of an adjustment to my last three session start times.

I can’t believe I did this today. I’m thrilled that I reached my goal. I’m also a little bit flabbergasted considering I have no idea why today was different from any other day. But it most certainly was.

Now, off to relax so I don’t go to bed exhausted. :D This has been an amazing day. I wrote 5,092 words in 4.58 hours of timed writing in 5 minute sessions.

200 Words In 5 Minutes Eluding Me

Lynn

I still haven’t reached 200 words in 5 minutes. I’m still trying. I’ve made 45 attempts and so far my high has been 165. My low has been 6 (which I blame on having to delete most of what I wrote just before the timer went off).

That low of 6 and many other lows have been today’s numbers.

This is the first time I’ve written this early in the day since I started the 5 minute sessions, and it makes me wonder if I’m seeing a pattern that means something, or if it’s just where I’m at in the story I’m working on. It doesn’t feel like the latter. It feels like my brain is sluggish this morning.

I can type 313 words in five minutes at top speed. I can type 203 words in five minutes at a leisurely speed. I can reach that goal of 200 words in 5 minutes. I know I can.

I took a short break and tried to clear my head so I can make what I hope are some much more successful attempts at my goal.

This is a personal challenge I intend to meet, even though it’s still eluding me for the moment.

A Writing Technique For the Distractible Writer

Lynn

Write in super short sessions. Not short as in one hour, or thirty minutes, but really, really short. So short that there’s almost no chance your mind will wander, and every time your timer goes off, you’ve just been reminded of what you’re supposed to be doing.

Here’s why I’m giving this advice.

Three days ago, I started writing in 5 minute sessions.

I’ve written at a faster pace in the last three days than I’ve done since I started keeping track of that kind of thing in January 2013.

These 5 minute sessions have gotten me to 1,581 today on one story. I wrote almost all those words in eleven 5 minute sprints, although I did have one 15 minute session where I was just writing some stuff that I needed to get down before I stopped on that story—I had made it to 1,200 but wasn’t quite ready to stop. That’s 1,355 words an hour. My usual pace is 300–500 words an hour.

Last year, I spent a lot of time trying to reach 1,000 words an hour consistently. That didn’t work out. In case you’re thinking I’m losing time to the breaks between the sessions, I tracked the time and found that over 5 sessions, I spent 3 minutes in breaks, total.

This has made me really think about how easily distracted I am and how that’s been affecting my writing. I mean, I know it’s been affecting my writing, but I haven’t really had any way to see just how short a period I’m able to stay focused at a high level when I’m writing until this experiment started.

I don’t want to over think this, but I’m definitely having thoughts about it, and I’ll be keeping it up for as long as it works.

I haven’t yet reached 200 words in 5 minutes, but that’s what I’m aiming for.

For those not in the know, I write what I consider finished words. I don’t do rough drafting with the intent to fix stuff later. I make sure things are right before I move on from one sentence and paragraph to another. If I fix stuff later, it’s because there are mistakes that need fixed.

What that means is that I don’t allow spelling mistakes, typos, or other stuff to slide as I write. So 200 is a GREAT goal for me. And I’m just going to keep trying until I reach it. :D Someday I will.

Even More 5 Minute Sessions

Lynn

I don’t know whether to call these sessions or sprints. Sprint fits best, because session is more inclusive of the time where I’m taking a quick read of my last paragraph and getting ready to hit that timer again.

This is likely giving me an inflated WPH count. I say that because my usual method includes that “breathing time” I seem to need between sprints. When I write for 1 hour, I’m including a lot of that breathing time, where my fingers are resting and I’m just staring into space. With these sessions, I’ve made it a point to do as little of that as I can, because I want to hit 200 words in 5 minutes at least once today. :) It’s a goal I have and it’s what keeps me doing session after session.

But this is really working for me. I mean, I might have just discovered one of my best ways of working. I’m so easily distracted when I write that having a 5 minute timer running keeps me super focused in the way a longer timer doesn’t.

I used to do 15 minute sessions, back in June/July 2012. Then I started playing around with things and decided half hour and even one hour sessions gave me better word counts. I never thought of going backward with my times. But it’s doing more for me than most any other session length I’ve ever tried. :)

None of those other session lengths have been able to keep me entirely in the moment the way these 5 minute sessions do. I struggled to reach 250 in 15 or 1000 in 60.

Yet, the lowest count I’ve hit this morning with 5 minutes is 116 words. That’s a pace of 348 in 15 and 1392 in 1 hour. The 5 minute sessions are generating my best word counts per hour of writing since I’ve started tracking them.

My brain seems to love the breaks between 5 minute sessions. It’s really helping me stay focused.

All I have to concentrate on is keeping the length of those breaks under control so I don’t break out of what is likely a flow state for me.

But my brain likes it. ;) So does my muse.

5 Minute Sessions

Lynn

I’ve been doing 5 minutes sessions this evening, and though it sounds weird to write in such short bursts, it’s really working for me. I’m on a record breaking pace (for me). :D Very excited!

Off to do more…

I’ll update later with results!

Update: I’m up to 1,266 words tonight, doing 5 minute sessions. So far my best session has been 165 words. I’m only going to do one more before I stop so I better make it good.

Well, that session wasn’t that great, and I’m ending the night at 1,360 words.

My overall average today came to 1,166 wph, which beats my previous recorded high of 1,155 wph. I did eight 5 minute sessions which together averaged out to a record breaking 1,430 words per hour. I had a session today where I wrote for a half hour without the timer counting down, and my pace dropped significantly.

This all came about because of the stuff I did Sunday, which I wrote about.

I’ll be doing this again tomorrow.

Same song too. I’ve had The Lumineers “Big Parade” on repeat and it’s really been working for me. I’ve had my best day since May 8.

I had to ditch the novella to get moving again. The frustration I’ve been dealing with over that book has been ridiculous and is probably to blame for most, if not all, of the last six months’ worth of writing woes.

I’ll revisit the novella each day after I finish my word counts for my other books and try to finish it, but I think I’m going to have to go back and delete everything after chapter three, maybe four, if I’m lucky—after I ditch chapter one and write a new one. That realization was when my frustration reached an all time high and I realized the only way to get rid of it was to accept that the novella is broken.

I guess I’m lucky that it’s the first one I’ve had that I couldn’t work out. Hey, I’m a discovery writer who outlines nothing, and this is the first book since I started that just hasn’t worked out. I can be happy about that. :)

All in all, a very good writing day. I just wish I’d gotten started sooner. :D

Ready for a Breakthrough

Lynn

Earlier today, I wrote 126 words in 5 minutes. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s on pace for 1500+ words per hour and that’s exceedingly good for me. EXCEEDINGLY. My average pace is more like 300 to 500 words an hour. In fact, I’ve never written 1500+ words in an hour before. Although it’s possible I’ve written 126 words in 5 minutes before, I certainly haven’t done it while timing myself.

What led me to this today was some journaling I was doing in Evernote where I revisited the typing speed versus writing speed debate I have with myself on a fairly regular basis. Don’t bother hacking into my Evernote account, because all you’ll find is a lot of rambling notes I’ve written myself and what amounts to a diary’s worth of angst over my writing woes. Seriously.

Selected excerpts from my notes to myself today:

Typing speed versus writing speed

I know I type faster than 50 wpm most of the time. I could even time myself to see what it comes to, as I write random stuff from my brain. I voice all these words, by the way, as I type them. I wonder how much that slows me down as I write?

Anyway, off to test my typing speed. I’m going to set a timer for 3 minutes and just type and then do the math.

I got 188 words in 3 minutes. That is a speed of 63 wpm. Not that great to be honest. I thought it would be more. I definitely need to start practicing my typing with some typing exercises.

So, my top speed possible in a hour would be about 3,760 words. If I did 50% of that, that’s 1,880 words. This might be “hard” but it is totally doable. Completely and totally doable, and I need to remember that. And 1,880 is 470 words in 15 minutes.

So why can’t I? There’s no reason. I can do it. I absolutely can do it.

While I’m waiting on my coffee to brew I’m going to try this again, slower, and see where I end up.

Okay, 122 words in 3 minutes this time. Much slower, and I deleted some stuff as I was writing just to get that in there. That felt more like real writing and yet it was still 2,440 wph. To turn that into my average speed, I can only be writing at 23% of my slow speed. That’s 15% of my top speed. Which makes no sense. I have to be letting my mind wander a ridiculous amount while I’m composing for that to be possible.

I think I can hit 2,440 words per hour. Probably not all the time, but I can definitely hit it some of the time.

Here’s the thing. I think I’m chasing the wrong ideal here. I don’t think putting all my effort into trying to make myself want to write for the sake of writing is the answer.

I enjoy competition, and competing with myself is just as good as competing with other people, possibly better, because I’m not comparing myself to anyone but myself.

Okay, I’m going to do some writing. What is my goal?

I’ve deleted lots, so really I should just write. I am going for 200 words in 5 minutes. If I keep typing and stop letting my mind wander, I should be able to do that. If I managed to type at top speed I could type over 300 words in 5 minutes. That would be AWESOME.

I’m going to give it a shot.

I wonder what I might gain from forcing myself to write really really fast and not worry about it being nonsensical. Would I get better at it as time went on? So that I could in a sense train myself to write super-fast and it make sense? This is something to think about.

I just wrote 126 words in 5 minutes. That’s the equivalent of 317 in 15 minutes. That is GOOD! If I kept that up for an hour, that would be 1512 wph.

Yeah. It was kind of boring. But it was also very interesting to me, because it wasn’t hard—although I admit it was hard to keep my focus on exactly what I was writing for even 5 minutes, but I did it.

I think it’s time to start working on a breakthrough in my writing speed.

Progress in Small Steps

Lynn

Small? Or tiny? Tiny might be a better fit. :D

If you want to know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about what I mentioned yesterday evening, when I was planning out how I could push myself to write more without sabotaging my current mini habit or stall my daily writing streak.

I might have found the way. :D

I’m very happy with the progress of my habit building. I don’t want to mess it up, and I knew anything I came up with had to work with those mini habits I’m working on.

Yesterday, I read an newsletter article about levers, small steps, and what to do when you don’t know what to do next.

I had a realization that maybe my writing is stalled because I don’t know what to do next (I’m sure there’s more to it, but this is quite likely a major contributing factor, considering I’m at decision point in every one of the four stories I’ve been working on and I’m having trouble getting started on any one of them.)

The author suggested writing it out until you do know what to do. So I did. My novella seems to be benefiting from this most at the moment, because that’s the story that’s on my mind.

But what stuck with me yesterday when I read the article was the idea that I needed to find a way to encourage myself to write more without putting any real pressure on myself. I read this article while I was exercising, by the way, and that was probably the missing piece that coalesced later into the idea I ended up going with.

Yesterday I wasn’t feeling well. But I knew I needed to at least get on my bike and pedal for a minute so I wouldn’t derail my exercise habit. I really didn’t feel like doing it, and I was positive I was going to get on the bike, pedal for a minute and then stop. I had enough willpower to at least do that.

And yet, what happened was that once I was on the bike, I couldn’t see the sense in getting off before I read that article, and then I couldn’t see the sense in getting off before I hit 15 minutes because I was so close to 15 minutes, and then 16, then 17, then 19. I got off at 21 minutes.

This has happened before, often enough that I’ve mentioned it to other people. I am now positive that, for me, getting started is THE most difficult part of anything I do. I believe this is the single biggest challenge I face, and I feel like I’ve finally figured out a way to tackle that.

I decided I needed to take some really small steps toward writing more, and hope that my internal motivation for writing would kick once I got started. So as I mentioned yesterday, I set 5 minute writing sessions, with time triggers.

All I have to do is 5 minutes of writing. If I want to wander off after that, then I can, and that’s perfectly okay. I’ll still end up with 35 minutes of writing at the end of the day, and that’s probably going to be more than I’d end up with otherwise. And I’m hoping it will train me to get to the computer more often and just get started.

So during my first 5 minutes this morning, I wrote about my story and what should come next. That helped a lot, to be honest. Then during my next 5 minutes (which turned into 9) I wrote on the story. In the next 5 minutes (which turned into 21), I edited some earlier parts and deleted some stuff, and I think I know where to take this story to end it.

See the progress? This is awesome! I’ve already got over 30 minutes of writing in today and I still have 4 5 minutes sessions planned. I really think there’s something to this… :D

And I feel really good today. That’s nice too. :D

Mini Habit Revisions

Lynn

I’m trying to create a habit out of daily writing. I’ve been trying to do that by having one simple rule: Write 50 words before lunch.

What I find myself doing though is squeezing my writing in at the last minute because I exercise right before lunch. I’m having to stop writing just as I get on a roll.

That’s a problem, because taking advantage of the natural urge to keep going past the basic requirement you’ve set for yourself is supposed to be one of the major ways mini habits benefit you—getting yourself started with willpower and taking advantage of momentum. This happens to me almost daily with my exercise. There have been many days where I’ve told myself I’m just going to do a few minutes, and yet I almost always end up sticking it out for at least 30.

That’s what I want to see happening with the writing. But because of the timing of it, that can’t happen without me making a conscious decision to mess up my working-really-well exercise and lunch routine. I know I could just get started sooner, but … if it was as easy as that, I would have already been getting started earlier. I’m a natural procrastinator, and even using willpower doesn’t change that. My deadline is lunch, and my subconscious has already decided it’ll be done by the deadline but not a moment sooner.

So, starting tomorrow, my one simple rule will change: Write 50 words by 10 a.m.

I don’t like it quite as much, because that’s a hard deadline. The reason lunch works for me is because I can just push lunch back by however many minutes necessary to make sure I get my words in beforehand. Hard deadlines are, well, hard.

But I want to get started earlier in the mornings and I just don’t know of any other way at the moment to encourage that habit, so this is what I’m going to try.

Results vs. Intentions Take Two

Lynn

Intentions?

I intended to write more tonight.

Results?

I spent two and a half hours shifting the posts on this website into and out of the different categories I have, until I realized what I was doing.

Then I stopped.

I have no idea if the sorting of my posts makes any sense, because I’m not even sure my categories make sense.

What I Learned?

I need to block this website when I sit down to write.

:D