Category: writing process (Page 1 of 18)

Some Ideas to Beat Procrastination

March 29, 2026 / / 0 Comments

You may also call it Writer’s Block.

  1. Write ideas, sentences, words, images, etc. on note cards. Small space and limited commitment. Bar is lowered. Easier to begin.
  2. Sit down at your writing desk, get everything ready to go and then offer yourself a real choice: Write or don’t write. No guilt if you choose “don’t write.” It’s a free choice with no shame attached to either option. There will legitimately be times when “don’t write” feels right, and there will also be many times in which “write” feels right. Don’t fight yourself. Writing creatively is fun. Let it be fun and not an obligation.
  3. Identify the negative thoughts that are the real cause of the procrastination. Here are some of mine: “What if I write something crappy?” and, “I’m just wasting my time. No one will want to read this,” and “I’m too old to be successful,” and “I’ll be bored.” Evaluate–really evaluate–these thoughts. Do they make sense? Redefine things like “success” and “failure.” Make success the accumulation of words (like scoring points in a basketball game). Failure, then, becomes zero points/no words. No more fear of writing something bad; good/bad are irrelevant to success. Or take “I’m just wasting my time,” and consider what “wasting time” really means. Isn’t stewing about not writing and sitting around looking at distractions the real waste of time? How would you like the next five minutes to go: adding words to a piece of writing or scrolling on your phone/stress eating/reading blog posts about procrastination? Which is truly “wasteful” and which isn’t?
  4. Test these negative thoughts by beginning to write and see what really happens. Consider it an experiment. Think you’ll be bored? Experiment by writing for five minutes and check to see if you really were bored. If you are, then try the experiment again but write about something else. If you aren’t, well then that is proof your negative self-talk is false. Keep these experiments short. Do them for five minutes. Keep doing them to see what factors impact your feelings and experiences. Change methods and behaviors to achieve greater impact. Make the whole thing into a kind of game or research study on yourself.
  5. Embrace your slowness. Slowness can be playful. It can be dreamy. Sometimes you need a dreamy, slow writing session that meanders. It still counts. In fact, stop counting. The writing still happens even if we don’t measure it. Which means it doesn’t help to treat writing like a job. It’s supposed to be fun (even if it is your job). Let your body, your mood, your mind, your whole self have fun and play. Even if you only have ten minutes to write, embrace slowness. Maybe you only get ten words in those ten minutes, but those are ten wonderful words that didn’t exist before. Savor them, enjoy the experience of writing them. You won’t always be this slow, so there’s no use beating yourself up about it.
  6. Don’t ever beat yourself up AFTER you’ve written (or before or during or…). That kind of negativity will linger. It’ll infect your next attempts. Here are the ways I beat myself up after a session: “That was crap,” or “Only one hundred words. Pathetic,” or “You’ll never finish, so why bother?” This is that negative self-talk again. Turn it around, stop it before it starts. Remember, success isn’t good/bad but words. Words written means success. Even if it’s only a few. By any measure of logic, even if someone only wrote one word per day, they’d still finish at some point. The only failure is to give up. So, “You’ll never finish,” is nonsense. Utter nonsense. If you’re writing–even one word–you will eventually finish. “Crap” is irrelevant. The measure of success is words. Instead of beating yourself up, celebrate. Even if you only wrote one word. Even if you sat at your desk and decided you didn’t want to write that day. Celebrate. Feel good about how honest you are with yourself and how you don’t want to make your writing into drudgery. You love to write too much to make it something that sucks the joy from your life. Celebrate every word you write. Not with a big party or anything, but internally. Allow yourself to be happy for who you are and what you’re doing. Even those ten words are an accomplishment.
  7. If you journal, use it for material. Maybe not word for word (especially if you write fiction), but use it for ideas. I’m often stopped/blocked because I think I don’t have any ideas. But I’ve been writing three pages in my notebook every day for years. That’s hundreds of pages of ideas, ready for the taking. Instead of putting pressure on yourself to invent the next scene on the spot, dip into the journal and read for a bit. Find a word or phrase that sticks, that excites, that surprises, that is usable for something and put it into your story/poem/essay/whatever. You don’t have to start from scratch.
  8. Make a list (and keep adding to it as needed) of all the things that excite you about your current project. Start your writing session by rereading and adding to this list before you do anything else. Let the items on this list remind you of why you’re doing this in the first place. Anyone can read or add an item to a list. If this is all you do in your writing session, celebrate. You’re getting closer to discovering all the things that inspire you. That will keep the fuel going throughout the process.
  9. Switch up the tools. If you’ve been writing on a computer, switch to writing by hand in a notebook or legal pad. Switch to those note cards mentioned in Item #1. If you’ve been writing longhand, go to the computer or a typewriter. Try dictation for a bit, just to see. Try sketching out ideas or using word webs to make things more “pictorial.” Use prompting tools like RPG random tables, story dice, prompt generators online, or flip open a dictionary, pick a word at random and then see how you might incorporate that word into your next paragraph or scene. Do a writing exercise without any expectation that it needs to go into your WIP.
  10. Read a book. Consider it R&D. Reading is just as important to a writer as writing, so you’re not really wasting time, are you? Tell yourself you’ll try again tomorrow (or whenever you have another chunk of time for writing), and that in the meantime, the reading you’re doing is helpful and productive. It’s refilling the well, feeding the muse, adding more words to your word hoard. Reading is a metaphor machine, an incubator, a compost heap. No shame in reading. Never ever. It’s the twin of writing, the other side of the coin. If words won’t flow out, flip the coin over and let some words flow in. And then celebrate your success! You are doing the very thing a writer needs to do. Reading is fun, after all, and so is writing.
  11. “Lightly, child, lightly.” “Don’t go about it in a serious way.” Play, play, play, play, play. If you’re playing, you’re living.

Juggling is lesson in art

January 25, 2026 / / 0 Comments

With juggling, you drop a lot of balls. You drop so many, so often, that it stops mattering. You are so bad for so long that your ego dies completely, leaving you free to keep going.

An art practice is a way of moving through life (hat tip: Andy J. Pizza). A juggling practice teaches you that this movement is full of failures, drops, frustrations, and that the only way to get past these failures is to pick up the balls and try again.

Again, and again, and again: This is the lesson of juggling, and the lesson of art-making. Even though I can juggle now without dropping the balls–can juggle one-handed, can switch between one-handed and two-handed, can juggle without stopping for a long time–I still need to practice. I still need to keep going, and I still drop balls every once in awhile. I sometimes have a false start. I sometimes throw too high or too erratically. Sometimes lose the rhythm.

But to juggle means to pick up the balls and try again.

Making art is not a one-and-done. It’s an attempt at continual motion that often involves losing the rhythm, dropping the balls, throwing too high. But the only way to make art is to try again. Moving through life means life happens: failures and frustrations. At some point, we drop the ball so many times, we either give up or die to self, realizing that failure is forward motion, that letting go of our ego (“I’m so bad at this!”) is the only way to keep going.

Yeah, you’re bad at this. This is what juggling teaches when we first begin. You’re bad at this, and yet you keep trying anyway. You WILL fail. The humility that comes from facing this truth and persevering anyway is the engine that drives the juggler and the artist. At some point, we laugh at all of our drops. Even now, when I can juggle without much difficulty, I still sometimes drop a ball. And I laugh it off. I shrug because of course. Of course I dropped a ball. That’s the way it goes.

Those of us who make art would be well-served by this attitude. Of course. Of course I wrote a clunker of a story. Of course I lost the thread in that essay. Of course I couldn’t find the right word and used an almost-right one instead. Of course no one liked that Substack post. Of course I got another rejection letter from that magazine.

Of course. That’s the way it goes.

And the juggler knows you simply bend down, pick up the balls, and start again. Drops happen to everyone. They are as much a part of juggling as keeping all the balls in the air.

The same goes for art.

On Keeping and Not Keeping My Pact

December 2, 2025 / / 0 Comments

In the spirit of Stephen King’s advice to finish a draft in the “length of a season,” I’m trying to finish my children’s adventure fantasy, Shards of Stolen Breath, before January 1, 2026. As such, I made a pact with myself last week to write for seven days, an hour-long chunk each day, to see what I could get accomplished.

I followed several procedures, namely, keeping the writing time flexible (to account for my unpredictable schedules), counting down the hour in twenty-minute chunks (to keep myself more accountable and not get lost in the weeds of distraction), and using the “skeleton scene” method of writing down scene ideas on note cards immediately before writing the draft. I also made a commitment to not focus on the number of words written but on the time spent in the chair.

It’s been seven days (the length of my pact to myself), and I’ve learned a few things about myself, my abilities, my inabilities, and what I need to work on going forward.

First, what worked.

Skeleton scenes were excellent. They gave me a road map but a loose one. When I started each writing session, I had a few previous cards to look at and gather ideas from, but I also had the option to sketch new scene ideas on new cards. Both sets of cards–previous ideas and new ideas–put me at ease and let me know that when the timer starts, I’m not committed to furiously rushing into the manuscript. Instead, I can think a bit, daydream a bit, let my imagination awaken, before writing. Even though I wasn’t focused on word counts, I ended up writing about 1,000 words per hour. This is a great pace for me, and it was almost effortless, which is what I want.

Storytelling should be a flow-state activity, and using the skeleton scenes to spur my imagination put me into that flow state.

The other thing that worked was the twenty-twenty-twenty timer regime. There were a few times when I got off track in my twenty-minute chunks, but the buzzing of the timer reminded me of what I should be doing, and thus, I refocused for the next twenty minutes.

Finally, I think focusing on time and not words helped me feel less anxious. It reduced the pressure and made my writing time feel more like leisure and less like work.

However, the caveat to this is that I couldn’t quite manage to ignore the pressure of writing more words. With a deadline of January 1–and an ability to do basic math–I know how many words I should be writing each week, and the fact that I did NOT manage to hit those words means I’m in danger of not achieving my “length of a season” goal.

Maybe the problem is in setting such a goal in the first place, but I wanted to experiment with writing more urgently (with a little more fire in the belly, so to speak), and the six-week time frame felt appropriately pressured without being too much.

But now, on the other side of seven days, I’m wondering if it is too much. I like the idea of finishing this novel by the end of midwinter, but maybe that’s not possible.

What is the “length of a season” anyway? If I’m following a four-season year, then that’s roughly three months per season. I’ve already written about 10,000 words of Shards, but I have many more words to go. Perhaps I should give myself two months to finish instead of one and some change?

This seven-day pact has definitely taught me that I can comfortably get about 500-600 words written each day–without limiting or straining my other responsibilities–so perhaps my season for Shards needs to extend into January. Even if I were to finish mid-February, that’s still setting me up to begin a new project in the spring and finish it before June.

But in order to do that, I’ll need to bump my words up from 500-600 per day to closer to 1,000.

The other lesson I learned from my pact is that I tend to stall out after 500 words. I never quite made my one-hour chunk any of the days. I’m curious to know why that is and what I might do about it. Is it a matter of needing a break? Splitting up the writing time into two different sessions? Or do I need to find a new tactic to get my spark back and finish the session?

Skeleton scenes worked well for getting me started, but perhaps there is another tactic for pushing me into my second set of 500 words.

Or maybe I need to recommit to focusing on my time in the chair and not bother about words at all.

Or maybe I need to use that second half of BIC (“butt in chair”) time to do other creative work. Maybe it’s time to do a writing exercise or creative daydreaming.

These are questions and experiments for another day (another seven-day pact?).

Now for what didn’t work.

I was not able to keep my pact for two of the seven days. Both Wednesday and Friday were traveling days (to see family for Thanksgiving), and I found myself completely unable to get anything done other than morning pages on those two days. I don’t know if it would’ve helped to schedule my writing time in the morning before departing, but the mornings were busy with packing, so I don’t think so.

Trying to write in the evening after a long day of travel proved too much. I’m not very happy about my failure here, but I did learn that perhaps I’m just not able to do much on a travel day. The stress of traveling is too heavy for creative work.

Going forward, on these kinds of days, I should be content with writer’s notebook time in the morning and focus on other ways to connect with my creativity later in the day. On both traveling days, for instance, we listened to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire while we drove, and that was a good way for me to stay connected to fantasy fiction and be inspired. Perhaps on these sorts of days, that’s all I can ask of myself.

In some ways, despite failing to stick to the pact for all seven days, I’m glad that I had those two “missed” days because they allowed me to see that my creative work is never going to fit perfectly into each day; instead, I can enjoy the creative, imaginative moments that do crop up without worrying too much about perfect adherence to the “plan.”

I certainly wrote a lot this past week, and that’s mostly because of my tactics and commitment to the pact. I also learned about what works and doesn’t work for my creative life, and I’ve got new questions to explore, new experiments to try. (Namely, how to keep my energy and focus going for the full hour.)

I’m not sure how useful this information is to others, but perhaps some of these tactics could help a writer who struggles with critical voice and distractions. Maybe skeleton scenes or the twenty-twenty-twenty timer method could help. Maybe the focus on time in the chair instead of words written could help. Maybe the flexible scheduling (doing it day-of and being open to changing it once the day gets going) could help. In a lot of ways, all of my tactics were designed to take the pressure off. If I feel pressured–if the writing feels like a “job” or an “obligation”–then I shut down. My tactics for this experiment allowed me to feel at ease without sacrificing my commitment to my art and getting the novel written.

I know that I’ll continue to experiment and tweak these tactics as I go. I’m thinking for my next experiment, I’ll do a second seven-day pact but try to address that 500-word lull spot I always run into. Maybe the answer is to try a writing exercise. Step out of the manuscript for a bit and see where it goes. I can always add it into the draft later (if it works out).

Artists need to balance flexibility with commitment and habits. I’m learning every day how I work best, while remaining open to change and flux. Ultimately, the storytelling I did last week was fun, fruitful, and energizing. Couldn’t ask for more from this seven-day commitment!

Pact and Procedures: Shards of Stolen Breath

November 29, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Pact: For the next seven days, I will work on Shards of Stolen Breath (working title), a fantasy novel for children.

The Procedure: Schedule a one-hour chunk each day and write during that time.

(I’m not going to specify a particular time until the day-of. My schedule varies too much to commit to the same time each day. For instance, on Mondays, when we have dinner with my parents, writing after dinner won’t work. Also, on Tuesday of this week I played in an online game of Castles and Crusades after dinner, so that also didn’t work. Wednesday through Friday, due to the holiday and traveling, were not predictable either in the time or the energy department. Etc. etc.

Basically, picking the One True Time each day is hard and ends in failure more often than not. For this experiment, I’m trying the day-of approach to see if that works better.)

More Procedure: Use note cards to write “skeleton scenes” before actually writing.

The idea here (and I can’t remember where I first heard the term “skeleton scene”… this might necessitate a trip to my archives…) is that by sketching out quick impressions or possible details for the scene, I won’t have to stop too long to think them up as I’m writing.

This is, perhaps, a form of “outlining,” but since it’s right before I start adding words to my manuscript, and it’s very much a whatever-comes-to-mind exercise in free association, and it’s not using any parts of my critical voice, therefore it feels much more “creative voice” than not. I don’t have to write the skeleton scenes either. I can simply reread what I wrote yesterday and jump right in.

But skeleton scenes allow a gentler “on-boarding” where I don’t have to feel like the words “matter” yet. I can let ideas come to me (without editorializing) and that makes the first words I type into the manuscript less “precious.” Basically, the fear and resistance is broken down. Skeleton scenes are like stretches before a run.

More Procedure: Set the time for twenty minutes (when I really plan to write for sixty).

Twenty minutes is doable. I can write quite a bit in twenty minutes and it doesn’t seem overwhelming at the start. Also, after twenty minutes, the bell goes off on my Time Timer and I can check in with myself: Have I really been writing, or have I only been “gearing up” to write?

If I’ve only been gearing up, I can get down to brass tacks in the next twenty-minute session and “open the document and stay in the document.”

And after that session, I know I only have to push through one more twenty-minuter and I’ll have met my pact agreement for the day.

If I set the timer for sixty minutes, and I start with some journaling, skeleton scenes (or blogging… heh), the time might quickly get away from me. I’ll feel like I’m writing fiction and adding to the story, but I’m really not.

Twenty-twenty-twenty means I get a little audible check-in every twenty minutes to make sure I’m doing what I want to be doing, which is writing fiction.

More Procedure: Do not, repeat, do not focus on words written (but keep track anyway). I’m not setting a words-per-day quota. This is a time-based pact only.

But I do want to see how many words I can get written in these twenty-minute segments because I’m somewhat hopeful that my procedures here will actually engender MORE words-per-minute than I usually achieve. I don’t know why I think that, but I’m partly doing this experiment to see if my hypothesis is right.

If it is, then perhaps the secret to writing faster and getting into flow-state is buried somewhere within these procedures.

I’ll have more to report when the pact is complete.

“The Length of a Season”

November 24, 2025 / / 1 Comment

So Stephen King said about how long it should take to write a rough draft for a novel.

I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve failed at this. I always take too long.

Before anyone starts in and says, “The story takes as long as it needs to take,” let me explain that while this may be a helpful maxim for other people, it is not for me.

I know because I’ve let novels take longer than the length of a season and always–always–it has hurt the project. I lose the heat. I lose the thread. I’m at a different place as a writer and my voice has subtly shifted.

Speaking with one of my students today, she had the exact same experience. She started a draft a few months ago but never wrote a proper ending. She added the ending recently, and she and I both agreed it lacked that certain oomph the earlier portions had. It didn’t have the same voice, the same energy. She’d taken “longer than a season.”

This happens to me constantly. I’m not saying this happens to everyone, nor that it necessarily happens to me all the time (I’ve had a few short stories where the break/pause ended up helping me work out something that was missing). But it happens to me often enough that I’ve got to actively fight against the fear and blockage that keeps me from riding the momentum of a project to its completion. Especially for novels. Both my interest and my ability to conceptualize the story dissipate the longer it takes me.

I want to get better at riding the wave. I have too many stories I want to write for things to linger on like this.

And thus my pact. My commitment. I will finish my next book in a season.

The Backstory:

I started writing a novel for my children earlier in the spring. They had brought home a book about dragons from the Scholastic book fair and it left me cold. Generic. Trite. Also, a bit too mature for my first and second graders.

I sprung into action and started writing a dragon fantasy novel using some of their ideas. I wanted it to be more in the tradition of books I remember loving as a kid. Something similar to the Prydain Chronicles, or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.

This, remember, was in the spring. And now it’s late autumn and I’m on chapter seven. About ten thousand words in. Not very far. And much longer than King’s “season.”

Nevertheless, I will persist, and in the spirit of King’s advice (and my own inkling about how my creative process works), I intend to finish the novel before the end of this season (this season meaning November/December).

To do so means writing 50-60k in a month (so, sorta like the NaNoWriMos of old), which comes to roughly 1600 words per day. I’m not going to hold myself to a strict word count quota (another quirk of my creative process: as soon as word counts come into view, I get the hives); instead, I’m setting a time quota: sixty minutes per day in the writing studio. A bit more on weekends to make up for slow days.

I’ve already built up a tiny bit of momentum because I’ve been working on the book for the past week or so, but I need a more formal commitment to really push myself and write with more urgency and gusto. Not urgency in the panicked sense, but urgency in the sense that this story will be best served if I get it out into the world without delay. In delay there is doubt. There is that changing of voice and squandering of energy. Like my student realized: taking “time off” from the writing didn’t help it; it just made it flatten, like a tire leaking air.

Why do we take that time off? Is it really to make the piece “better”? Or is it fear, resistance, tension, doubt? It’s worry and perfectionism. It’s a defense mechanism. If we keep going, we might end up somewhere “bad.” We might flub it. We might not know where to go next and make a “wrong turn.”

But I would say the more harmful thing, from an emotional and intellectual standpoint, is to let a story idea taper off, to let a novel die on the vine, to never finish the piece. Losing the energy, wiping out from the wave: these are the bigger troubles. A tough, wild wave is easier to ride if you don’t intentionally jump out of it. Better to stay on and ride it out than to jump off and tread water, hoping for a new wave to come along.

I’m going to keep riding the wave. I’m excited, in fact. There’s a thrill here. A high-wire act (okay, now I’m mixing metaphors). But the idea that I can build my own momentum, that I can accelerate myself to the end of a novel: it’s exhilarating. It’s fun to think that in six weeks’ time I’ll have a rough draft novel to share with my children. I’m hoping this experiment shows me a new way of working, of approaching my creative projects. In the length of a season, I’ll have something new and complete.

“Rule 6: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.”

October 21, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I want to believe this rule. I want to live and make art and teach within the bounds of this rule. Like a mantra, I want this rule to be a constant refrain within me.

But this is a hard teaching.

I want badly to win, whatever that will mean. Maybe it means more readers, or more money, or more accolades. Maybe it means being happy with my output, with the finished product.

Instead, I fail. I don’t get the readers, or the money, or the accolades. I am unhappy with my output, doubting its quality, hating it. The finished product is an embarrassment. A mistake.

But nothing is a mistake. Like Yoda, this rule is saying either make or don’t make. Those are the only two sides to the dichotomy. Those who make, make. Those who don’t make, don’t make.

Winning and failing are not the opposed forces. Making and not-making are the opposed forces.

It’s the fear of mistakes, of wrongness, of failure that keeps us from making.

This is against the Rule.

Failure is an illusion. As are mistakes.

There is only make.

If you make, you are making. If you don’t make, you are not making. This is the only choice. Everything else–everything–is outside of your control. It doesn’t even exist according to the Rule.

“Nothing is a mistake.” That means you can’t possibly make a mistake. Only Nothing is a mistake. Only not-making is a mistake. It’s a mistake because we are called to be makers, to be sub-creators. If we don’t make, if we let Nothing into the world, then we have ceded ground to the mistake. Only by making can we prevent the Nothing.

This is why there’s no win or fail. A different kind of rule would say, “If you make, you win.” But that’s not this rule. This rule isn’t false positivity. It isn’t false praise. The whole concept of winning, of making something that “wins,” is the thing that’s false.

Making has nothing to do with winning or losing. Making has to do with making. There is only make or not-make. The win/lose is a paradigm of competition. Making is not a competition. A lot can happen if we make, and a lot can’t happen if we don’t make, but winning or losing are not part of those options.

If we make, we add to the world. We imitate God.

If we don’t make, well, we don’t. We go along with our lives doing other things, I guess, but those things are not making.

Right now, I am making something. These words are my making. They can sometimes feel like a mistake. I can start to worry that I’ve failed. I can yearn for the “win,” the high praise, the big bucks (though this is unlikely to happen for a lowly blog post!). I can fear the failure, but none of this–the wish to win, the fear of failure, the worrying about mistakes–is part of the actual making. The making is me putting words to the page. The making is stringing sentences together into a whole. The making is the act of making, and that really does exist outside of win/lose, success/fail.

I am making right now. Each letter typed is an act of making. Good/bad, win/lose: these are not involved. The only thing that is happening right now is the making.

And when I’m done, I’ll have a choice. To make or not-make. If I choose not-making, if I choose nothing, then, yes, I have made a mistake.

But I wonder if it’s even possible to choose nothing. Every moment is a moment of making if you think about it in the right terms. Every moment involves thoughts and actions. Those are part of making. Making decisions, making breakfast, making a joke, making a smile. We cannot help but make.

So there’s no fear when I sit down at the computer or with my notebook. I’m already doing the making. The making is already happening.

I don’t need to worry about believing in this Rule. Believing in it has nothing to do with it. Winning, failing: those are immaterial. Those are beliefs. Whether they are false or true is outside of this Rule. I don’t need to believe in either of them.

I only need to make. And I’m already making.

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