#ROW80 is A Round of Words in 80 Days. It’s a quarterly writing challenge where you define your personal goals and blog each week about your progress. It’s made to be flexible and allow for tweaking.
This week has been all about finding time to write when I can. Before this year I had very few restraints on my time, so I could write for days if I felt like it. For the most part that’s come to an end and I have to learn how to write like everyone else, which is when you can. There are some who are lucky to have a set time or allotment of hours that go to writing, even those who write full time. You, people, I am jealous of.
We all write differently. Not just our stories, characters, etc, but our writing process is different. Hopefully you have an idea for maybe when you write best and under what circumstances. Me? I write best later at night, usually after 8 P.M. until roughly midnight and I know that in that four hour chunk of time I can churn out several thousand words. I’ve made a few books happen that way.
These days, I can’t do that. I’m needing more sleep to accommodate my earlier mornings. There are more activities in my evenings. For the first few months this year I floundered. How did I deal with this? There are books to write and I need to make them happen!
The rational decision was to shift my writing earlier in the day. But I’m a night owl! I write best at night!
I started out writing on projects that are purely for fun, not publication before I started, during that pre-work hour when I’m waking up. It turned into an enjoyable span of time I spent creating fictional candy for my own brain. Writing during lunch has been amazingly productive, to the point that I can knock out half my daily word count on my contracted projects if I’m lucky. This all means that by the time I switch gears after work, I’m excited to dig into what’s left of my daily section of writing and it’s actually happening faster.
This week, because I feel like I’m behind on the story, I’m actually turning that morning writing time and working on my contracted project. I’m bummed that my “for me” story is on hold, but going back to it will be that much more exciting when I get to dig into what’s going on there.
How do you make the writing happen with your schedule?
