Hour on, hour off

On her Throwing Up Words blog, Carol Williams discusses how she balances her writing with the rest of her life. The Utah writer and WIFYR mastermind writes for an hour then takes an hour off to deal with other things, then writes for an hour.

During that hour on, it is strictly writing, no Facebook, emails, or phone calls, “just me and the computer and the story and the best words I can put down.” She’s worked this out with her kids and they know interruptions aren’t allowed (though her girls do take precedence over anything).

When the hour is up, she can deal with cleaning or family matters or preparing dinner. She sets a timer and sixty minutes later it’s back to writing.

Carol tries to stick to this schedule but knows there are times when it is not possible. She is strict with it, yet lenient. She says that this approach makes it easier to quit when the time is up. Somedays she goes two hours on, two off.

She is a more dedicated writer than I. She writes at least for hours daily. Carol also has more publishers in her life pushing deadlines, a problem I would like to have.

I’m writing for at least an hour a day. (Most days. I was busy over Christmas and didn’t write for three days.) I set a timer and sitting at the keyboard for sixty minutes is manageable. When the writing is working, the time flies and the timer means I can get up, stretch, and move around before returning for more time. On days when I’m fighting the story, an hour with butt in chair is not terribly long, yet results in a word count.

I’m swinging between two projects, the one I started for NaNoMriMo and the one I’m sharing with my critique group. The plan is to alternate between the two. Spend one hour on one, get away form writing for a while, then spend an hour on the other.

Whatever your strategy, you have to make it work for you.

  

(This article also posted at http://utahchildrenswriters.blogspot.com)

Obstacles

Now that November is over, we can take a breather if we were pushing for 50,000 words. I fell short, as in about halfway short. But I’ve got a story in the works.

It is a volume two to another. I was that close to sending the first to one of the agents from last summer’s WIFYR when the wonderful Carol Williams offered to take a final look at it. She found issues and raised questions. As I couldn’t satisfactorily answer them all, the story stalled.

That was August.

I’ve picked at it since, but things wouldn’t resolve themselves. I would bounce between thoughts of Carol knows what she’s talking about, but she’s just one voice and we writers are free to ignore critique suggestions, then back to she really knows children’s literature and what publishers are looking for so maybe I ought to listen to her. Nonetheless, I couldn’t see what she was talking about and couldn’t repair it.

Along came NaNo and I started the second, same characters, same voice. In the middle of the month, I began reworking volume one to share with my writer’s group and voila; there was what Carol was talking about. The matured voice, or main character, or whatever from the second book helped shed light onto the shortcomings in the first. Spending the month revisiting the character in a different story has allowed me to critically understand the MC in a new way.

That is the way writing goes. At times you’re stuck with some major obstacle in front of you. Later it’s gone and the path is clear.

(This article also posted at http://utahchildrenswriters.blogspot.com)