One of the most important aspects of writing, to me, is figuring out how best to incorporate writing into your life. I’m sure all of us would love to have endless hours in the day to devote to working on our stories, but that isn’t the case for a lot of us out there.
I’ve come up with five tips below that will hopefully help you to find time and ways to work writing into your daily routine. Making it a priority, without overloading yourself or falling behind on any of your other tasks, is extremely important to becoming an efficient and happy writer.
1. Read: An experienced writer should also be an avid reader. Read outside of the genres you feel at home in – it’ll help you learn more about the craft in general and you may pick up little bits and pieces along the way of things you want to incorporate into your own writing. Don’t just read good, well known authors; read the bad ones as well. See what they do wrong in their novels and look at how it could be fixed. Learning how to solve writing problems is an excellent way to develop your skills and avoid committing the same problems.
2. Create a Routine: Learn what time of day you write best and when you’re most productive. Carve out as much time in your daily schedule as you can to write – be it 15 minutes or an hour. Add that writing time into your routine and make a daily appointment with yourself. As you hold fast to that time, it will become part of your life. The time is just for you and no one else. Don’t give into excuses when you want to try and get out of it. As you get more and more into it, you’ll find that you have more time to write.
3. Get Out: Go sit in a coffee shop or bar and people watch. Go for a walk. Move your body and observe what’s around you. Brainstorming in the comfort of your home or in a solitary place of your choosing can be helpful when developing a larger plot line, but going out and looking around will help spark ideas. Breaking away from your normal routine occasionally can help develop ideas that may have been stuck in your brain for some time, gathering dust.
4. Research: I don’t know about you, but I love to research. I love looking things up, seeing what they look like, and filing them away in my brain. Find a way that works best for you to track all the things you research. It can be printing images out and putting them on a bulletin board or creating Pinterest boards that are private, dedicated to characters you’ve been imagining. When you have an itch in your brain of something you’re curious about, feed into that. Look things up and put them in a place you can go back to later.
5. Write, Write, Write: All of these tips mean nothing if you don’t simply just write. Planning and researching are wonderful and all part of the process, but actually putting fingers to keys or pen to paper is the actual goal. Even if, at first, you’re not able to set a firm writing appointment with yourself each day, just try to find bits of time throughout the day where you can write a few sentences. If it’s while you wait for the bus or when you’re sitting on hold, take that time to write something down. It doesn’t need to be anything substantial or toward the project you’re working on. It can even be how you feel being put on hold – just write something. Oiling those gears in your brain daily will make everything easier in the long run.
I hope these tips help you develop a more efficient writing routine and habit! Leave a comment below with your own writing tips.