Writing in Coffee Shops

Physical Preparation

Bring stuff you need. Bring writing implements such as paper and pen or a laptop. I know a man who’s written dozens of short stories on his cell phone. If you bring a pen, make sure you bring more than one and that they all have ink. Bring a sharpener if you use pencils.

Bring headphones just in case there will be a table of noisy people (a rarity in your chosen place, but a possibility).

Bring things like aspirin or anti-acid tablets. You shouldn’t have to leave after half an hour because you have a headache.

Dress appropriately. Don’t under dress and freeze your butt off. Don’t over dress and drown in sweat.

If you bring your work on a flash drive, make sure you bring the flash drive and that it has your most recent work. I generally mail the evening’s work to myself when I’m finished writing, which gives me access to it anywhere in the world at any time. If I can’t get an internet connection, I’m very happy that I backed everything up on the flash drive.

If you’re taking your cell phone (some leave it at home), make sure it’s fully charged and that the ringer is not annoyingly loud.

Mental Preparation

We’ll get into this in more depth in the next section. The most important thing to remember here is to let everything else in your life slip away. Your one concern is writing. For the next hour or two, nothing else is important.

The more often you write in a coffee shop, the easier it will become. Once you’ve established that this is the place to write, the more likely you’ll automatically get into writing and work mode as soon as you feel that coffee cup in your hands.

Your Writing Routine

This is how I do it. You might want to fiddle around with this until you work out a routine that works for you.

Relax

Sip some coffee and re-read whatever you wrote the previous day. Make some minor changes but save major things for when the piece is finished. I’ve seen some people close their eyes for a few minutes or practice some other form of relaxation…I saw a woman with her feet behind her head, doing yoga before she wrote…in the coffee shop.

Keep this in mind: It doesn’t matter what you write. It’s first draft and no one else will see it. You’ll have all the time you need to rewrite it and make it perfect. But first, you need something to work with.

Focus/Visualize

Make some notes about what you’re going to write just to get your mind in gear. I usually make a few notes on who’s in the scene, what the main action is and how it ends. I might even make a note about the imagery and symbolism. This should be mindless writing and it should never take more than two or three minutes.

If you’re writing non-fiction, focus generally on the evening’s topic. You don’t have to write at this point. Just let yourself think about the topic…what you hope to accomplish, how it will begin and where it will end.

Write

Put the notes aside and write mindlessly and quickly, don’t stop to correct or revise, write for an hour or so. The key is to not stop, at least not long enough to stop the flow of the story-telling. It’s almost impossible to let a spelling error go after you’ve seen it…or a grammar mistake that will eat at you as you write. Go ahead and fix that small stuff (but not when you’re doing your mindless writing exercises) but stay away from the big stuff. If you spend half an hour writing and re-writing something then you’re getting into too much detail and not enough story-telling. Save the big revisions for when you’ve finished your first draft.

Reflect/Review

Read over what you’ve written and make minor changes, remember: major revisions come when the first draft is finished.

Re-write

I don’t do this, but some people do. You might squirm at the thought of looking at first draft work the following night. You want to look at something that’s at least half decent. First draft work is rarely half decent. It sucks and it’s awful. But it provides a stairway to good writing. The problem with re-writing is that it takes time and it focuses on too many details. At this point, just get the story first and then make it read well. But then, it’s your writing…do what works best for you.

Stop Writing

Don’t write beyond what you can handle. I never spend more than two hours writing, especially considering that I may have to get up for work the next day. If you’re staying until midnight every night and working a full-time job, you’re going to be a prime candidate for burnout.

Final Draft

Eventually, you’re going to finish the first draft of your novel. This is when you get into the real job of writing. This is the beginning of the revision process. I’ll be posting an article on the revision process I use. It’s tough and time-consuming but keep in mind that editors and publishers will stop reading your submission if you make a grammar error on the first page.

EXERCISE

Do the mindless writing exercise using the word BANANA. Write for 15 minutes and put it aside without reading it. Come back to it the next day and re-read it and make some revisions. Come back to it again a week later and re-read and revise. Read it the next day and compare it with the first try.

This exercise will show you how even abysmally bad writing can be crafted into something good, something that will make you say (with a smile), “Yep, I wrote that.”