M. Suzanne Terry

Sometimes I start longhand.

Andi Cumbo-Floyd’s second volume of Love Letters to Writers comes out on November 19, and I’ve had the privilege of reading an advance copy. I’m also reading/listening to Lauren Graham’s Talking as Fast as I Can and not participating in NaNoWriMo this month but living vicariously through others who are. So I’m doing a lot of reading and thinking about writing but not actually doing a lot of writing (well, not the creative kind that I like to do, anyway).

As reading about writing usually does, though, today’s selections have ganged up on me to remind me of why I miss NaNoWriMo when I don’t participate. It’s not the goal itself (although that’s a fun challenge) but rather the daily practice.

I balked at the write-every-day rule for a long time because I had a rigid idea of what that looked like.But what these two books and the reminder of what a month of intense word count goals can do for my writing have conspired to teach me is that writing every day is more about consistency than anything else.

I could use some more consistency in my creative writing practice.

I’m not going to try to start late and catch up for NaNoWriMo (although that would be entertaining). Instead, I’m going to set a measurable goal, just like we do every Monday in Andi’s online writing group, of setting a time aside for creative writing every day for the rest of the year. Lauren Graham outlines Don Roos’s Kitchen Timer method for doing so, and I’m going to borrow some of that structure to help with the goal.

1. Every Sunday night, I am setting specific times to write every day and putting them on my calendar, just like any other appointment. I am also going to keep in mind that 15 minutes is longer than I’ve written most days this year, so if that’s the time I have some days, that’s the time I have, and that’s okay.
2. During each writing appointment, I have exactly two things open. A current creative project I’m working on and my journal.
3. The rules:
   * No internet
   * No music with words
   * No sudden spurt of cleaning or organizing
4. Spend every minute set aside writing. If I get stuck on the project, I can switch to the journal.
5. When time is up, it’s up. This is the part that I’ve skipped in the past, and I think that was a mistake. It felt good to go on in the moment when I was on a roll, but it also helped me justify skipping the next day (or two or three). Then I got out of the habit of writing daily. But I’m going to honor the rest of my schedule by ending my appointment when it’s scheduled to end.
6. Monitor progress, but don’t let it prevent future progress. If I miss a day, I need to not dwell on it. If I only write 15 minutes a day for two weeks, I need to take the “only” out of that sentence. I tend to take myself less seriously as a writer if I don’t feel like I’ve spent enough time on it (whatever that means to me at the time). The truth is, though, that many authors have written whole books in the 15 minutes a day that all their children were asleep at once. There’s no reason that time frame can’t also work for me.

If you were to thumb through my handwritten journal, you’d find a motley array of scribbles – blog ideas, story outlines, bad poetry (all my poetry is bad at first), floor plan sketches, recipe ideas, daydreams about how my ideal job would look, etc. Knowing it’s there as an option takes away some of the resistance to a set writing time that I often feel.

I think that fighting that resistance is going to be key. Keeping my writing appointment every day can answer that annoying voice that tells me I don’t care enough about writing to make it a priority. Overcoming that voice (with the occasional assistance of CBD gummies and a qualified professional) can help me fight the anxiety that stifles the creativity I need to work toward developing more focus on my projects.

Definitely looking forward to that.