How to keep in touch with your book when your writing routine is disrupted

I’d planned a post about self-editing. But then I thought – really, Roz? This close to the holidays, who cares?

Indeed, it’s more likely that the seasonal ding-dong is turning your routine downside up. If that’s merry and welcome, great.

But some of us (including me) get panicky about losing touch with our work.

This post is for you.

Don’t fight it

Resolve to do smaller sessions on your book. To stave off anxiety about your slower progress:

1 Figure out how much time you can regularly set aside, realistically.

2 Make a schedule.

If you do this, you’re in control. You’re making a plan you can stick to. Goodwill henceforth.

How to think small

Here are ways to think smaller while still making progress.

1 If you use wordcount targets, reduce them, obvs – then surprise yourself when your concentration lets you exceed it.

1.5 Or turn the limited time into a challenge. Use it as a chance to try a new approach – if you’re a slow and careful drafter, see what happens if you write fast, hell for leather, as a deliberate experiment. Sometimes, busting our habits can make us unexpectedly spontaneous and creative. Nobody need see the results if they’re bad. But you might just find you’re soaring.

2 Make a list of small but important tasks. We all have niggly stuff that we postpone. Consistency about character names, the plot timeline, pieces of research to check later. For me it’s place descriptions – I don’t have the mental space for them while I’m in the flow of characters and action. It’s great to have time to sort this out properly and not worry about anything else. Make a list of small tasks you can do in short bursts of time.

Embrace the break – and prepare for a smart restart

Or – accept that you’ll let your book doze for the period. And prepare for a calm and bright restart.

1 Make handover notes. The 2018 you to the 2019 you. What issues were you were working on? What was the next thing you were going to check, revise or fix? What new idea were you going to try?

1.5 Worried that you’ll forget why an idea seemed perfect? Here’s how to write down story ideas and remember why they were brilliant.

2 Annotate the manuscript with comments. I’m doing this with my own manuscript. Where I have an idea for a sequence of dialogue or a nuance, I write a comment at the appropriate point in the Word doc – eg ‘I want this to echo what xxx expressed earlier’, or ‘make sure I haven’t repeated this’.

3 Kick up your heels. Read greedily, anything that tickles your mistletoe. As I wrote in this post recently, my own reading tends to be constricted by my work, like a strict diet. But if I’m not worried about skewing my WIP’s tone and style, I read … anything I like the look of… like a normal booklover. It’s no bad thing to rejoin the normal world once in a while.

There’s a lot more about writing in my Nail Your Novel books – find them here. If you’re curious about my own work, find novels here and my travel memoir here. And if you’re curious about what’s going on at my own writing desk, here’s my latest newsletter. You can subscribe to future updates here.

Why we need stories – tales of the earthquake at Authors Electric

We know why we write. It’s a natural inclination that some of us have to express ourselves on the page. But what might bring out the storyteller in non-writers? This incident from my recent trip to Italy turned a disparate group of friends into campfire tale-tellers – it’s on the Authors Electric blog now.

Have you had an experience that turned you and your non-writing friends into storytellers? Tell your tale in the comments here