Category: Writing

Natalie Goldberg says in her craft book, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within,

It is important to have a way worked out to begin your writing; otherwise, washing the dishes becomes the most important thing on Earth — anything that will divert you from writing. Finally, one just has to shut up, sit down, and write.

Getting started in your writing can often be the hardest part.

It’s so much fun to dream about what we’re going to write for the day. You wake up and lay in bed dreaming about that new story you’re going to cook up at your writing desk, or the next chapter in that long novel you’re working on, or even a new Medium piece about something you’re interested in.

You want to write it, whatever it may be. You’re excited to write it.

But thinking about your writing session and actually doing it are two completely different things. Yes, it’s fun to dream up new ideas and characters and things we want to put down on the page. However, at some point, if you want to be a successful writer, you have to sit down and do the work. Not just starting it day after day, but finishing it, too.

I’ve written almost two dozen novels, and yet still one of the hardest things to do to this day is to just get started. Especially when you’re staring at a blank page, whether it’s page one of something brand new or page 301 on the draft of the novel you’ve been working on for months, getting started can often be tortuous.

It’s scary to face that blank page and put new words down. You doubt yourself. You don’t trust you’ll get the scene right. You think you might screw up the whole thing, and the world will know how you don’t have any talent, that you’re a phony, a fraud, a lousy writer.

You have to get those voices out of your head and do the work anyway.

Those inner voices that say how much you suck are not helpful, particularly when you decide to find anything else to do besides write. My belief is that you’re only a lousy writer if you’re not writing. It doesn’t matter if what you write today does actually suck because you know what?

Any words on the page today means you can change those words tomorrow. You can take a mediocre scene and over the course of many revisions make it soar, make it great. I can’t tell you how many pieces of fiction I’ve written that were dreadful in that first draft, but with a lot of hard work, determination, and discipline, I was able to make them so much better.

You have to get started, it’s one of the most important things you can do as a writer. And you can start in any way that works well for you. In her book, Natalie Goldberg gives some suggestions, like the following…

Make a date with a writing friend to go over your work, thus making you have to write.

Take a writing class, which will also force you to write.

Start writing within minutes after waking up.

Allow yourself a sweet treat from the pantry if you write for one hour non-stop.

Fill an entire notebook every month.

A lot of these I’ve tried, and only some of them have worked — a writing class definitely works because your workshop date is put on the calendar and therefore you have to produce some writing or the class you’re in can’t go on — but the one that’s always worked for me, that has allowed me to write twenty-one novels in the past eleven years, is the last one Goldberg talks about in this chapter of her book.

Scheduling time to write every day is one of the main keys to success as a writer.

Yes, Goldberg talks about this strategy too, and if you have no idea how to begin your writing each day, try this one.

Many people have asked me throughout the years how I’ve managed to write so many novels, and something I always tell them is that I schedule time to write. And I stick to that schedule every day no matter what.

Scheduling time to write every day is the most helpful way to get your words down. For example, if I’m drafting a new novel, I try to maintain 2,000 new words a day. It can be a little less than that, or a hell of a lot more, but that’s the goal. And on average, if I’m focused, I can write 500 words in about thirty minutes. That makes for on average two hours of writing to reach my word count goal.

Therefore, I find the two hours a day that work best. For you, it might be the first thing in the morning. Or it might mean the afternoon, or the evening. Keep in mind the later you schedule your time to write, the more likely you will skip it when other life events and responsibilities begin to shape your day. I always recommend you do your writing earlier rather than later if you can.

But in some cases, morning might not work, and that’s OK!

I teach early in the morning five days a week, so my writing time lately has been 4pm to 6pm. That’s my time for me and my creative process, with the door shut behind me. I’ll take the dogs out and make dinner after I’m done. And I need an hour when I get home from teaching to decompress.

But when it’s time to write — I get started almost exactly at 4pm, and I don’t stop until either 6pm arrives or I’ve reached my desired word count. It’s crucial that I do the work because If I skip a day, and then skip another day, before I know it I will have gone a few weeks without any writing at all, and I’ll lose the momentum of whatever current project I’m working on.

So try scheduling time to write every day and stick to it however you can — that’s always my recommendation to writers trying to find a way to write more words, who might struggle to begin a new session.

If you treat writing like a part-time job and know you have to write during a specific block of time, then you’ll get it done, the same way we clock in at our regular jobs and begin working. You have to think of writing the same way.

Whichever method works best for you, beginning your writing is always a crucial first step to producing good work and finding lots more success in your creative life!

In her book Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg says,

Making a list is good. It makes you start noticing material for writing in your daily life, and your writing comes out of a relationship with your life and its texture. […] [The list] helps to activate your writing quickly and cut through resistance. Naturally, once you begin writing you might be surprised where your mind takes the topic. That’s good. You are not trying to control your writing. You are stepping out of the way.

One of the scariest things for a writer is the blank page.

It doesn’t matter how experienced you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re starting your very first short story or you’re James Patterson. Every new writing project begins with the blank page. The cursor blinks. Your fingers hover over the keyboard. You’re going to have to craft your latest work one word at a time just like everyone else.

And if one of the scariest things for a writer is the blank page, something even scarier is having no idea what to put on that page. Yes, some days we all stare a little too long at the computer screen no matter how prepared we are, no matter how confident we may be about what to write for the day.

But for the most part, when we sit down at our writing desk knowing what we’re going to tackle, there’s always more success than when we sit down just wanting to write. That’s a terrific quality to have, you want to want to write, but often that passion isn’t enough.

So what can help keep you on track as a writer and find more success?

A notebook, of course. Filled with topics, ideas, random thoughts, questions. A place you can go to peruse things you might be interested in writing about and for whatever reason you haven’t gotten to yet.

It doesn’t matter what kind of writing you do. If you’re a fiction writer, a list of topics and ideas help guide you toward great stories — often two great stories blended together to create a work of art only you can produce. If you’re a poetry writer, those topics and ideas can bring to mind powerful images that can result in one stunning poem after another. If you’re a non-fiction writer, you’ll find inspiration from your topics and ideas to explore some territory you might not have ever thought of before.

And better yet, if you just want to do some writing today, not for anyone else but yourself, one simple topic or idea can offer even the smallest nugget to guide you on your daily writing journey as you continue growing in your craft.

In her book, Goldberg gives the reader a series of prompts to get the imagination soaring, like the following…

• Begin with ‘I Remember.’
• Take me through your morning.
• Write about the streets of your city.
• Describe a grandparent.
• What kind of animal are you?

Some of these prompts might lead to terrific stories and poems. Some of these prompts might simply get your creative juices flowing, allowing you to write for even just five to ten minutes before you take on your larger writing project for the day.

You have to begin somewhere. And even something simple that gets you going always leads to success.

There’s nothing worse than staring at that blank page for more than a minute or two with nothing to write, nothing to say, nothing going on in your head. It’s fine to daydream here and there, sure, and there are times when I’m writing when I hit a wall and I’m stuck and I have no idea what to put next. That happens to the best of us. And that’s okay.

But what you never want to do is sit down at your writing desk without a clue as to what you’re going to write for your session. We’re all busy, and we all value our time, especially for our writing. And so you want to make every minute count. It’s why I typically plan my next week of writing every Sunday, almost always taking a couple minutes to write that schedule down so I can turn to it whenever I’d like.

But going beyond having a schedule, you want to have a notebook and preferably a dedicated section in that notebook for lists of ideas and topics for upcoming pieces. These will help you find what you want to work on, and better yet, the actual act of listing itself will often get you excited to start your next writing session.

You can’t have writing success if you don’t do the writing. And so one way to help you get started is to create and continually add to various lists in a notebook you set up however you’d like. Set it up in a way that feels comfortable to you, but have something. And turn to it often.

Lots of things help you have a good writing day, and making lists will always be one of them. So get thinking. Get writing. And the success will come.

In her book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg says,

This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. […] That’s how writing is, too. Once you’re deep into it, you wonder what took you so long to finally settle down at the desk.

I’ve always thought of my daily writing routine the same way I think about exercise.

Most days I don’t want to exercise. I don’t want to go for that long run around the neighborhood, and I certainly don’t want to make the trek to my local gym a few days a week. If it were up to me, I’d maybe go for one run a week (Wednesday evenings) and attend one gym session every few weeks (the occasional quiet Sunday afternoon).

And weirdly, as much as I love writing more than exercising, some days I really, really don’t want to do that either. I’ll sit down at my writing desk early in the morning and stare at the computer screen and want to do literally anything else. A run and a gym session, plus a deep clean of my entire house. I will stare at that blank page and wish I could have found something else to do with my life, anything else.

This kind of feeling never goes away. Whether I’m writing the first draft of a novel or a story or I’m working on a new revision or I’m struggling with a query letter or a synopsis, it’s all hard, it never gets any easier, and oftentimes the most difficult part is just getting started.

But as Goldberg talks about in her amazing craft book, it’s necessary for us to exercise every day to keep our bodies healthy the same way it’s necessary for us to write every day to keep getting better and never allow our work to get stale.

This is not to say you have to write thousands of words every single day.

Many years ago that’s exactly what I thought writing every day meant. I thought I had to be constantly working on a new novel or a story, and what ended up happening was I was writing so much that I could never slow down to make any of my work richer, deeper, more complicated.

The best writing doesn’t come out during that first draft, after all, but in subsequent drafts where you do your best to build up everything that’s working well and then cut down or eliminate things that fall flat. The most important part of a first draft is to finish it, always remember that. And then the real work begins.

What I believe Goldberg is saying in her quote, and what many authors mean when they say to write every day, is to just write something every day. It doesn’t have to take hours. It can be just a few minutes. It can be ten minutes of jibberish just to get your mind racing. It can be three super clever tweets for Twitter. It can be a short review of a film or book you read recently you want to share on your blog. It can be a Medium piece about writing, which is the main piece of my own writing I’m focusing on today!

It does not have to be two thousand more words of that novel you’re working on.

Because here’s the deal — once you get started with some kind of writing, usually you get into a groove that makes you want to write more. Again, getting started for the day is often the hardest part. And especially when you’re drafting a new piece of fiction, you don’t want to make mistakes, you want to produce good work, and usually that kind of mindset can debilitate you to the point of writing absolutely nothing. You do not want this.

So try to treat writing as you do exercising — do a little bit each day for your health and for your mind.

Don’t feel like you have to run for three hours the same way you don’t need to write for three hours. Yes, a few days of the week you might want to write more than usual, at least try, but what’s most important is that you find little pockets of your day to write something of value to you.

What helps me a lot is planning a schedule every Sunday for the following week, and I do my best to stick to it. Even when my day is crazed at my full-time teaching job, I will fit in even just ten to fifteen minutes of writing. I’ll draft a brief new scene in a work of fiction. I’ll revise a chapter of that book I plan to query later this year. I’ll write a new Medium piece. I’ll just journal my thoughts even!

And you know, if you happen to go the occasional day with no writing whatsoever, don’t feel bad. I went on a five-day trip to Los Angeles earlier this month and did almost no writing of any kind. It’s okay! It happens. None of us is perfect, and it doesn’t mean you’re not a good writer.

When it comes to the writing life, always remember to think about it as a marathon, not a sprint. The same way I think the best kind of exercise is a slow life-long marathon to keep me healthy rather than a frantic, heart-pounding sprint here and there.

Just try to find time to do a little writing every day, no matter what it may be. No matter if anybody will eventually see it. Enjoy the writing, and come back to it often.

And you’ll be surprised after years of daily practice how much better of a writer you will eventually become.

In her book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, Natalie Goldberg says,

“First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.”

The first draft of any kind of writing is hard.

Staring at that intimidating blank page leaves lots of writers wanting to do literally anything else — including this guy right here.

There are a thousand ways to screw up the first draft of something, which has certainly happened to over the last eleven years writing twenty-one novel manuscripts. Some of them have worked out better than others, like my newest middle grade novel that came out really well in its first draft. But some have not worked out so well, like my newest young adult novel that’s such a mess I’m not even sure where to begin in fixing it.

But what I tell other writers all the time is that when it comes to the first draft of a manuscript, ultimately the way to easily guarantee instant failure is to overthink and analyze every paragraph, every sentence, every word, you put on the page.

I once had a friend who told me she couldn’t write another scene of her first draft until she went back and re-read and revised every single word she’d already written in the manuscript. This is why she always took a long time to write the first draft of anything, and it’s frankly why she rarely ever finished anything.

She expected perfection. And there’s just no such thing as perfection when it comes to a first draft.

The best thing you can do is turn off your inner editor.

In her magnificent craft book Writing Down the Bones, something a friend of mine gave me a copy of recently and that I’ve been slowly dipping into the last few weeks, author Natalie Goldberg talks in an early chapter about why it’s so important go with your first thoughts in a new piece of writing, never a second or third thought. Its those latter kinds of thoughts that can actually ruin a piece of writing that had a chance to be something great.

She suggests that authors give themselves timed exercises in which you never really think at all and just write instead. Just write whatever is in your heart. Write something. Anything. Even nonsense can lead to something of merit.

These are her rules…

“Keep your hand moving.

Don’t cross out.

Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar.

Lose control.

Don’t think. Don’t get logical.

Go for the jugular.“

That last one is super interesting in that she suggests if you ever get uncomfortable with something you’re writing about, you should lean into it right away and never against it. Some of the best writing comes when we dig into something that’s buried deep within ourselves we’ve tried to ignore.

But notice how almost every rule above is about stifling that awful inner editor. That voice that says your writing sucks, your writing is stiff, your writing makes no sense, your writing could be so much better.

I hear that voice all the time when I’m writing the first draft of a new story or novel. I’ll hear it ten times, re-read the last paragraph I wrote, and hate it so much I struggle to get another sentence on the page.

This is death for a writer. And you’ll never finish your newest project.

The important thing is finishing your first draft. Your inner editor won’t help with that.

Your inner editor prevents you from finishing your manuscript because you don’t think it’s good enough. But you know what? I’ve said it dozens of times before, and I’ll say it again.

You can’t improve a manuscript you never finish.

What’s more useful? A brilliant novel that’s sixty percent finished? Or a messy novel that’s fully complete?

Yes, you might have more work ahead of you on that messy first draft you know is going to take months and months to make better. But at least you have a beginning, middle, and end you can actually work with.

That’s what Goldberg is getting at. And it’s what I tell writers all the time.

Your inner editor can come out when you revise. It needs to be there when you’re working on the second, third, fourth draft.

But on the first draft? Put it aside. Bury it under the ground for a while.

Instead, you need to focus only on the writing itself. Just write, write, write.

Definitely keep your hand moving. Definitely don’t think. Definitely go for the jugular.

And tell us your story!