People frequently ask writers how they create stories— “What’s your routine?” This week, I’ll share a few thoughts on my writing process. Perhaps you’ll find a few of my tips useful.

Every writer is different. Your mileage may vary. 

Your Writing Mission

Different people want different results from the writing process. To work through emotional issues via storytelling, enjoy the flow of words across the page, or tell yourself the tale you really want to hear are goals no less worthy than creating a steady income stream to support yourself by book publication. And a person’s goals may change as time goes by. Decide what you want from writing, now. That is your mission.

My mission is to promote story-sharing among all sorts of people. Telling my own stories, both factual and imagined, is one way. Lifting up other artists is another. All that promoting and telling and lifting implies an audience to hear the stories, so my mission includes outreach (i.e., marketing).

Your Life Priorities

Know that many worthwhile ways to spend your time demand your attention: relationships, family obligations, your own health, your wage job, other creative talents, social and political action concerns, etc. Yet you can only have one top priority. 

If your mission involves consistently turning out high-quality work, you must value your own writing career highly and give it the necessary hours. Writing must be near the top of your personal priority list for your art to make much progress toward fulfilling your mission.

For the past few years, I’ve put writing way up there on my priority list, just to see how much I could accomplish with a truly concentrated effort. Without that decision, my blog and published stories wouldn’t exist. On the other hand, I’ve cut way back on my wage job time and regular exercise. My bathrooms are gross. Priorities are hard, but I only have so much energy. 

Your Writing Routine

We all have our own most productive times of day as well as our most creative periods of the day. It’s in our biorhythms. Observe yourself and identify your own patterns. Give your best time to your highest priorities.

I work harder in the mornings, although creativity is more like to strike randomly in the afternoon or evening. My wage job is flexible (and part-time now), so I was able to reschedule my day to leave the mornings open for writing. I jot down creative thoughts in journals or text messages to myself throughout the course of the day. 

Your Work Pattern

A corollary to integrating your best time of day into your writing process is understanding your production pattern—your “chunk.” Allie Pleiter presents a wonderful seminar (and has a book, if you can’t attend a seminar) on determining just how much work you can actually get done at a sitting. Once again, you need insight into your own work habits. Spend a week or so paying attention as you work on your current writing task. You will likely notice that you go through these stages every time you sit down to write: 

• Not working at all—looking at social media, drinking coffee, cueing up the perfect playlist, etc. 
• Starting to work, but distractedly—writing, but also making lists, “researching,” etc. 
• The “zone”—the sweet spot. Immersed in the story experience, everything else in the room falls away.
• Mental fatigue—the story starts to feel stale, and you know you’re phoning it in.

Observe your writing process several times, noting how much time you spend in each phase. This information determines your “chunk,” as Pleiter calls it—how long you can naturally work at a sitting. And knowing how long you actually procrastinate when you sit down to work is the first step toward putting a limit on playtime.

Many people figure chunks in terms of word count as well as time. This is another area in which writers’ brains vary from one another. I don’t default to word count in thinking about my work; I think in terms of scenes (during the earlier stages of the process). During editing, I’m more aware of how many hours each work session took. 

Knowing that I will fiddle around at my desk for a while before settling down to work, I make every effort to limit the email and social media time to under thirty minutes. After that, my natural work pattern is around two hours or one scene of writing. (My scenes tend to be 1000-1500 words long.) 

By then, it’s lunchtime. Also, time to go see a wage-job client, run errands, or take care of my home environment. Maybe I’ll take a walk. (I’m really pushing that higher up on the priority list these days!) With any luck, I’ll get in a short chunk of writing work done in the late afternoon. This could be devoted to the story but is also my best time to brainstorm story problems (since it’s optimal creativity time for me). 

Audience building requires lots of time-consuming activities, but I’d rather not devote my prime time to it. Ideally, these tasks are best left to the afternoon or evening. 

Your Writing Business 

If sharing your writing with an audience isn’t a priority, then you don’t need to think about the business side of this creative endeavor. But I urge every writer, if not now, sometime soon, to consider making their work public. Like music, story sings when it’s shared. To mix metaphors, the reader or listener is the other side of the equation. 

The business of writing can be as simple as reading a story at an open-mike event or sending it to a magazine or e-zine for consideration. Or, you might hire an agent, contract with a publisher, or indie publish your books—and do that over and over again, building a story production business. 

Part of my writing process has been to learn as much as I can about publishing and marketing. While I’d like to confine those hours to afternoons, sometimes they intrude on my mornings. So much needs to be done that at times I’ve had to use my most productive brain to do them.

The balancing act can be annoying, but I prioritize finding my audience and sharing stories with them. Yet it is always a comfort to get back to the fiction!

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