Bullshit-Free Ideas for Building an Adaptable Writing Routine

Disclaimer 01: This isn’t a foolproof method. When it comes to writing advice and techniques for productivity I always say it’s best to keep an open mind, to take only what works for you and simply leave the rest.

Disclaimer 02: This is geared toward fellow novel-writers, or for lengthier fiction, with the intention of publishing, but no matter what kind of writing routine you’re trying to build, the ideas I’m discussing certainly can’t hurt.

YOUR WORKSPACE

Some people will tell you that your writing routine needs to be sacred and strict, that you need to develop discipline. I don’t quite believe that. Discipline is important but any shame from not accomplishing the routine you’re trying to set strips away the very real ways writing can and should be rewarding to you. You can absolutely curate a space for yourself that you aim to write in, but being strict about the ritual of writing makes it hard to create an adaptable habit that you can take with you anywhere.

My mother swears by the idea that, if you have a desk in your bedroom, you should make sure your workspace is facing away from your bed. If your living space doesn’t allow for that, consider putting up a partition or arranging your furniture in such a way that you can’t see your bed. There’s some psychology to this, like how your bed should be for sleep and sex only and by extension, your bed and even your room should be associated with rest. Being able to separate those spaces may have a positive effect on your writing and work (and sleep).

That isn’t a hard and fast rule though. Some people are chronically ill and disabled and thus have a much different relationship with their beds, others may have limited space and must use their bed by necessity. A few other options that come to mind are investing in a wheeled bed desk, so your writing space can be moved away from your bed when you are done. If the option is available, consider making your bed and sitting or lying on a specific blanket when you’re working.

Whether your workspace is in your bedroom, on your bed, or in a separate room altogether, it is good practice to eliminate as much distraction as possible from your desk or workspace. Your experience with distraction is unique, so you may need to do things like blocking apps or website usage from your phone and browser for a certain amount of time, turning on Airplane Mode or Do Not Disturb, clearing your desk or table, etc.— whatever you need to do to eliminate distraction, do it.

Make sure your space is well lit. Background light is essential to avoid eyestrain when staring at a screen. Also, consider blue-light blocking glasses if you’re working at a computer, or an app that reduces the blue light of your screen.

If you’re using a chair, it should be comfortable but functional. My chiropractor recommends scooting your butt all the way to the back of the chair to take the strain off your lower back. Consider it like sitting on your thighs rather than directly on your butt. The most important thing is that you’re comfortable though, don’t worry too much about your posture.

WRITING TIMES

You need to make time for your writing. In the summer the sunshine wakes me up at dawn or earlier, which I don’t really mind despite not being a morning person. Before the other people in my house start their days, when it’s too hot to comfortably snooze, I can get myself up and get some writing done. That’s around 3 hours of quiet time to write if sunrise is around 5:10 AM, and everyone else creeps out of bed around 8:30 AM.

I finished July 2019 Camp NaNoWriMo by following this routine, which ultimately led me to complete the very first draft of the novel I am still working on (let’s call it SAP). For those of you who are unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is a community challenge to write 50’000 words in the span of a month. The official month is November, but there are Summer Camp versions in April and July where you get to pick your own word-count goals. I participated from 2018 through to 2020.

Making time doesn’t mean you have to stick to the same kind of routine. I’ve read many How to Write books that say your routine should be sacred, but in my opinion that doesn’t help you master your skill. Being adaptable as a writer helps you get the words out, and personally, it’s always easier to fix something than it is to create something from scratch.

Some of us work full-time jobs, some of us are parents, some of us are in school, etc... So what can you do to honour the writer in you when you barely have time to breathe, let alone create a writing routine? Time bites. 5, 10, 15 minutes. While you’re waiting for the bus, in the waiting room, waiting for the timer on dinner to count down, anytime at all.

These concepts come from the book 5000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter by Chris Fox, which is available in paperback and ebook. I find a lot of these How to Write books can be a bit preachy, which is why I offer the disclaimer to take what is of value to you and to disregard the rest. You can learn a lot from these books but it’s okay if the methods taught within don’t work for you 100%.

Micro Writing Sprints and Macro Writing Sprints are the key to writing when you’re navigating time bites. These terms, I’m sure, must sound familiar to a lot of people. In this case, micro means anything under 10 minutes, and macro means anything over 15 minutes, but it’s flexible. The goal is to write as much as you possibly can within your allotted time— an actual timer is optional.

Something to keep in mind is knowing your personal limits. If your attention suffers and you start to wander after 15 minutes, limit your sprints to 5-10 minute bites, and give yourself 5-15 min breaks where you get up, drink some water, move your body and then come back to your writing. Getting up helps give your brain a break and refocus. You’d be surprised at how much writing you can accomplish when you do several short writing sprints throughout the day.

These practices helped me finish the first draft of SAP, a project very close to my heart, that ended up totalling a messy 119’000 words. I’m currently working on the second first draft after a long hiatus, and have come back reinvigorated with some significant evolution to the story and its characters. These practices still exist within my writing routines today, but I’ve learned how to be flexible based on the circumstances in which I’m writing (school, work, holiday, etc).

These honestly may not be easy to hear, but bear with me.

Your first draft is allowed to be a mess. You get to clean it up when it’s done. Stephen King says you write your first draft with the door closed, and the second with the door open, and I like that saying a lot. Revising became more fun when I accepted that the first draft would be a mess. I got to make fun of myself for my weird writing quirks— every single one of my “most common errors” in my Grammarly report was about misusing commas! But something that’s extra fun, is finding elements of your writing that you love, being surprised by a very poignant passage, and being proud of the mess you made and getting to enhance it even more toward its final form.

You have to kill your inner editor. Or at least subdue them. You’re allowed to fix a typo or anything similar, but that’s really it. You need to allow yourself to get into a mindset where the writing is the most important thing you’re doing, your prose is allowed to be a mess. Leave the insecurity upstairs, no one else has to see this draft, you just have to get those words out of your brain and onto a page.

If you come up with something that changes a significant aspect of your story, write a note about it, and then continue on with your draft like it’s been that way the whole time. Do not go back and change things. Just keep writing.

I mentioned NaNoWriMo earlier, but I have another, even more extreme challenge that I was introduced to through the writing community on Tumblr, which I rebranded for my personal usage, but the concept is the same. The Full-Tilt First Draft is a seven-day undertaking to write the first draft of your novel. It is meant to be chaotic. But it is also meant to challenge you to focus on getting words out and worrying about the quality later.

A) Plan to your preference (outline, character notes, etc., the outline doesn’t count in the week)

B) no editing, make notes of major changes and keep writing

C) if you want to scrap something use strikethroughs, keep everything you produce this week

D) go HAM and have fun

Learning how to do Writing Sprints helps you get into the habit of putting everything down as fast as you can without overthinking it. Because the real thinking is for later when you’re revising. You get into the writing zone much faster, making even five minutes enough to make some significant progress.

This advice can apply to long-hand writing in a notebook, but the way I did it was by using Google Docs. Since I could open it up on my phone or my laptop or my tablet, it was the ideal medium for me to throw some words down whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Outlining will help you write faster.

I am pro-outlining, please don’t click away because of that, because I still absolutely believe that you need to use what works for you, and if you’re reading this maybe something isn’t working, so please keep your mind open.

Don’t be scared of outlines. I used to hate them too, but I learned to love them when I realized they aren’t cages and I can manipulate them and change them as I work through my draft. Outlines are guides, they exist to help you get from Point A to Point E without “wandering” around too much.

Even if outlining isn’t for you, at the very least I recommend taking some time to write down some prewriting notes. This technically applies to more lengthy writing sessions, but even a few minutes of bullet-point notes can make a significant difference in how focused you are.

I wrote out a small fragment-filled paragraph of what needed to happen in the first few scenes of my July 2019 Camp Nano project and got them out much more easily and faster compared to when I didn’t. I was able to write sustainedly in 30-minute time bites with a great deal more focus when I did some prewriting, and still maintain this practice when I’m not using sprints.

Picking your outlining method is a personal journey as well. I’ve used several different methods, and not all of them work for every project, nor every iteration of the same project. For the first draft of SAP I broke it down very mathematically; I gave myself numerical goals to hit: 90k words, 25 chapters, 3.5k per chapter, 4 scenes, 875 words per scene. I gave myself 4 bullet points for only the main events that had to happen in that scene to move the story forward, and some limited “sticky note” allowances to write down special details.

I overshot that word goal by 29k words, but it was still a method that worked really well for me at the time. I surprised myself while I wrote and had revelations about characters and the story that have since helped it evolve. I felt like this guideline I’d given myself was actually helping me expand my writing rather than confine it in any way. Now that I’m working on SAP again, I’m using a totally different method, and have tried several to get to the point I’m at now.

Something I’ve found invaluable is a concept that didn't actually have a name until I revisited this article, so I'm calling it Story Debugging. It’s partly inspired by the concepts of freewriting, “rubber duck debugging”, and morning pages, which I learned about in The Artist’s Way and Writing Down the Bones. Essentially you just write out your ideas, your plot holes, explain things as if to a stranger, put down any random thoughts, ask questions, work out possible answers, etc. Have a conversation with yourself.

Your brain absolutely knows how to solve the problems you’re having with your story. It’s enough for me to write things out in a hurried chaotic mess with no consideration for formatting or punctuation, to jump from thought to thought wherever my thoughts take me. I did this with SAP, and another project that came to me in a dream (NMC), where the lore and worldbuilding was a major plot hole until I managed to debug it and now have an amazing concept to work with.

Libbie Hawker’s Take Off Your Pants! was game-changing for me when it came to outlining another project of mine (let’s call it HS). I jotted down notes the whole time I read it and applied the method to my outline. It’s not complete by any means, but it helped me reach more deeply into my characters’ psyches, secure more insight into the plot dynamics of the story, and helped me establish a strong foundation for when I’m ready to finally write it.

Hawker has written books in 21 days, so there is definitely some magic in her method. In her book, Hawker details that creating her outline took 4 hours. When I outlined SAP the first time it took a week (5 days), I haven’t actually finished my outline this time but I’m already starting the writing and hoping to build upon it as I go since I know the story so deeply at this point. I didn’t have Hawker’s method the first time I made an outline, but giving outlining a chance in any capacity made writing that draft much clearer and focused.

Save the Cat! Writes A Novel is another book I read that I enjoyed a lot. My uncle recommended the original Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder which is about breaking down your story in a screenplay format, but Jessica Brody takes those same lessons and applies them to the craft of prose (fiction) writing.

Ultimately the outline method I use more often now is a combination of Hawker’s and Brody’s with my own personal touches. I put it together in Google Sheets, which has its minor downsides, but ultimately serves me very well. Those books also led me to design a narrative chart of my own, to help my understanding of pacing and where and when things ought to happen. It’s a reference combining several different popular ‘narrative structure’ charts writers would be familiar with.

How to Write a Damn Good Mystery by James N. Frey is another book I had a lot of fun with. Frey has a handful of How to Write a Damn Good [Blank] books, from novels to thrillers. The language used in the book can be a little dated but it’s still worth the read in my opinion. The methods in his book helped me further develop SAP, which is a Romance Thriller and gave me a lot of ideas to help me lean more into the thriller genre.

If anything I’ve shared here has helped you, I’ve succeeded. If I’ve given you some books to add to your to-read list, I count that as a success too. I had my eyes opened by these books, they made me feel excited about my stories again. I read them because I felt like something was lacking in my writing routine, and while I haven’t developed one ideal writing routine out of these lessons, I’ve learned how to be more adaptable given the circumstances and environments I find myself in. That learning is ongoing.

Don’t force yourself into a mold or into a certain practice. Don’t let anyone tell you you must write a certain way, or that you must have certain specific habits in order to be a writer. It’s bullshit. Words are our artistic medium, we can learn the basics of how to use them, learn all the tips and tricks on how to put them together, but developing our unique practice is what ultimately makes us stand out.

Thank you so much for reading! Your engagement helps me reach a wider audience! If you like my work and would like to support me, please click the heart and consider leaving a tip. No amount is insignificant. ♡

— Rooney