Writing Advice – Craft & Process

This morning I’m pondering the right first move to bed into my daily routine. Right now, I have about four first moves that will kick of my day, depending on which groove I’m in: 

• Getting up and journaling to park ideas; 
• Getting up and writing directly into the computer; 
• Getting up and doing the day’s Worlde, then posting it to my family chat; 
• Getting up and brain dumping my top-of-mind thoughts into an Omnifocus inbox, then doing a project review and building my diary for the day.

Of the four, Wordle is the worst option. Logging in to finish a Worlde puzzle only takes about three minutes, but it puts me in a social mindset because the next step is going into chat, and from there it’s a short skip to spending the entire morning answering email and tooling around on social media.

Journaling is probably my favourite kick-off, but the chain of events that follow that meditative writing often means I’m slow to build up steam for the rest of the day. It’s harder to transition into day job work (or, at least, it was harder to transition into my old day job work), and harder to actually launch into writing projects that aren’t drafting blog posts.

Waking up and drafting is often a good first step — I hit the ground running as a writer, then get coffee after finishing my first 500 words of the day. There’s nice, clean end points that tell me when it’s time to set the manuscript aside and focus on the day job. In many ways, it would be the ideal first move….were it not for the fact that I struggle to write on tired days, and that can throw my entire day out the window.

Writing is also loud, given the ferocity and speed with which I type, which means it’s not my spouse’s favourite first move given they’re usually trying to sleep while I’m hammering out words. 

My Omnifocus mindsweep was a relatively new approach, inspired by Kourosh Dini’s Creating Flow With Omnifocus. I picked it up during the chaos of pulling the BWF program in January, when everyone was working from home and our CEO was on leave, and it was great for wrangling my on-the-verge-of-breakdown brain and giving some structure to my day.

It was also great for eliminating the feeling that I was about to miss something important, but also hard-wired into my brain as a dayjob thing that I’m not sure I’ll grock it as a creative kick-off. I also fear that it’ll push me to focus on writing-adjacent tasks, such as publishing or editing, in spaces I’d normally reserve for drafting new work (which also begs the question: is this a bad thing?). Worse, it tends to blur the boundary between “day job” and “not day job” in a way that’s tricky to manage — it largely worked in January because I was working 11 hours days at BWF and there were no boundaries. 

Were I working for myself full time as writer and publisher, I suspect it would be the perfect first move. Right now, I’m pondering whether the flexibility of the new work-from-home dayjob makes it worth adopting once more.

I’ve been musing over all fo this for a few days now, and realised that routines are tricky because they’re as much about identity as everything else. Each first move reflects a different fascet of my self-identity, and throws the focus (and delivers solutions for) a particular aspect of the self. None of them are explicitly wrong (although Wordle is less useful), and each delivers benefits that are useful at specific times. 

My ideal routine — one jotted down as a thought experiment if writing and publishing was all I’m doing and money wasn’t an object — revealed some interesting gaps. In the scribbled notes I pulled together, the vision of myself in that situation would:

• Get up early and go through some kind of exercise/meditation combo to clear my head.
• Journal for a short stretch, breakfast
• Spend an hour tinkering with novel plans and making notes about future works.
• Write 2000 words directly on a computer
• Break for lunch, and possibly read a little.
• Go through the Omnifocus Mindsweep after lunch, to kick off my ‘work’ day in the afternoon., where I focus on publishing and editing.
• Walk.
• Dinner
• Meaningful consumption of media and experiences until bed.

I’m honestly surprised that both exercise and novel planning are so prominent in that list, given that they’re largely absent in my current process, but ideal selves aren’t working with any of the limitations that our real selves are negotiating as we bumble through our lives.

Stil, it’s got me thinking about whether a fifth first move is worth considering….

My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there.

Our kitchen is a disaster zone at the moment, too. So is our bathroom, our living room, and my car. Our bedroom is relatively well-composed, although I’m behind on cleaning the CPAP machine and that’s taking a toll on my sleep. 

Other disasters: my writing process, my publishing timeline, my PhD deadlines, my planning systems. Invisible chaos that’s largely unnoticeable unless you’re inside my head and trying to wade through the detritus in order to get things done.

The great temptation of chaos is this: nothing is fixable unless everything is flexible, and if you let things slide long enough, the very notion of getting ‘caught up’ is the stuff of nightmares and wry laughter. So you sink into the chaos, doing nothing.

There’s a logic to it: if I don’t wash the dishes, I don’t have to solve the problems with my PhD thesis. I don’t have to email the authors whose books weren’t getting released because BWF ate all my available spoons and threw off all my plans.

I don’t have to deal with the really complicated feelings I have around leaving the Festival, even though it was the right thing to do, or my fear around what happens next.

Of course, I’ve been here before, and I’ve got some pretty well-worn habits that kick in when chaos descends. First and foremost, I reach for Dan Charnas’ Everything In Its Place, and revisiting one of its very first lessons.  

On his way to work, LiPuma saw commuters dashing for the subway—flustered, sweating, stumbling—and the next day he’d see those same commuters rushing again. After working in the kitchen, LiPuma couldn’t understand what was wrong with these people. Why not get up a half-hour earlier? Wasn’t greeting your day better than fighting it? Why not make your kid’s lunch the night before, lay out your clothes, do anything you need to do so you can get up and not run around like a maniac so you can smile and enjoy your day? That was, after all, what LiPuma was beginning to do in the kitchen. Stress and chaos were a normal part of his job. But if he could control a little bit of that chaos—preparing for what he knew was going to happen—he could greet chaos, embrace it. His mastery of the expected would enable him to better deal with the unexpected. You plan what you can so you can deal with what you can’t.

Time to take a deep breathe and go back to first principles: Greet the day. Plan first, then arrange my spaces so they’re usable again. Clean as I go and focus on the next action, rather than extrapolating forward to the point of chaos and failure.

 I’m not a chef, but any writer knows that stress and chaos is a huge part of the job. You can’t control it, so your main job’s getting back to a space where you roll with the punches a little better. 

Elizabeth George writes a journal for every novel, logging thoughts, ideas, and problems before she starts her writing day. Every day, she runs through the same pattern: read an entry from an old journal from previous novels, then write a new entry about the book she’s currently working on.

This habit gives her the scope to recognise that whatever she’s experiencing right now, she’s experienced it in the past and worked her way through. Problems got solved, and books got written. 

There are damn few problems in writing sufficiently new that I’ve got no experience in figuring out how to battle through. The problem is never solutions — it’s registering the problem is in play and certain solutions are entirely within my control, even if they’re difficult to implement.

Having looked through my calendar yesterday and recognised, yes, I was definitely not in a good place, I then ran through the checklist of things I know will help after a terrible month of writing:

• Block out my day (and writing commitments) the night before, so I know what gets done when
• Set my alarm an hour earlier
• Don’t touch the phone first thing in the morning
• Get up, feed the cat, and handwrite in the brain dump journal
• Jot down rough notes for today’s writing session before I write, because I don’t have time to ponder as I go right now 

I’d let some of those things slide during the chaos of November. At least two I’d been ignoring for months prior to that, because they were solutions to a particular problem (limited writing time) I haven’t faced in five years.

But I’ve solved this problem before using tools I’ve picked up here and there. And there’s no shortage of tools and ideas that might help (I rediscovered Elizabeth George’s Write Away and journal habits while revisiting John Roger’s Notebook system, and was reminded the power of rough notes in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Writing Through Fatigue workshop on her Patreon).