TAKE STOCK OF YOUR HABITS & ROUTINES.
I've shared a few nuggets of inspiration about creating habits and routines in the past few Writer Wednesday posts. Have any of them spoken to you? Here's a short list of of suggestions, or items of note:
- Check in on your habits and routines—need a refresh?
- Write when your brain is fresh.
- Do your creative work first, business work second.
- Chunk out your day. Allow for down time.
- Limit your expectations—don’t set your daily goal too high.
- Instead of word count or chapters, think scenes—something easily achievable.
- Be flexible—life intervenes.
- Discover your own process.
- Be consistent.
Habits, routines, and processes—it’s all up to you. Sounds overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be. Consider that however you design your day with your habits and routines, and however you craft your processes to write your book; these are your special ways of doing something.
We don’t have to do things alike.
Writers are individual people with unique talents and lots of spinning stories in their heads. Stories that are all different. Shouldn’t our processes be different, too?
Stands to reason, I think.
Author Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project), in the book Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, shares the value of frequency in relation to routines, and nicely ties routines to ideas and creativity as well as productivity.
“Frequent work makes is possible to accomplish more, with greater originality…” she says.
- Frequency makes starting easier.
- Frequency keeps ideas fresh.
- Frequency keeps the pressure off.
- Frequency sparks creativity.
- Frequency nurtures frequency.
- Frequency fosters productivity.
- Frequency is a realistic approach.
This speaks to me. Being consistent is something I work at. Perhaps by putting a new name to it—aka frequency—I can do better. The more we do things, the better we do them.
If there is one change to make, I vote for frequency. What say you?
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Excerpted from my book, Discover Your Write Path to Publishing Success -- available right here in my bookstore, and at book retailers everywhere. Or perhaps, check your local library!