Change your writing habits!

All manuals for use by apprentice authors encourage you to set up a writing “routine” (translation: write a number of words/pages/signs fixed in advance every day at the same time and stick to it no matter what ). And now, today, we are asking you to do the opposite! But who are we kidding?

However, it is true: as much as it can be profitable, if you have a long-term writing project , to put yourself in front of your keyboard every day and force yourself to “produce”, it is also necessary and even beneficial. to sometimes shake up your habits… Because writing every day can, like any routine, become in the long run a mechanical and unimaginative act – the height of it! Many authors take advantage of a change in their daily life (travel is a typical example) to refresh their writing by going to write elsewhere and differently. Why not take advantage of summer to shake up your routine?

Change location, times… or text

If you don’t intend to move, you can decide to change hours or location, or experiment with different ways of working . The American writer William S. Burroughs offers a little exerciseaiming to change not the conditions in which you write, but rather the text itself and the way of working on it: you print a page of your professional biography writers and cut it into four parts. Then you endeavor to reorganize these without preconceived ideas, forgetting the logic which had governed the order of things. All you have to do is return to your manuscript and rework your text, keeping from these modifications what serves it best… A way to “let go” and get out of routine without losing sight of your objective: to progress your text and your writing.

Writing block: how to get out of it?

Since yesterday, you have been going in circles. Nothing comes or everything that comes is good for the trash: total blockage. Don’t panic: you can get out. Especially if you are in one of the following 2 cases…

You have no idea 

It’s “the” classic blockage when faced with a blank page . You are hypnotized by the screen or the sheet which never stops sucking you into a sidereal void. To the point that you are convinced that all that could save you is to take a smoke break, make a phone call to your friends, or even go down to the local bar for a little coffee… or even ( the worst of the worst) to dive straight into the fridge…

STOP! Don’t put down your pen or your keyboard: not only is your case not hopeless, but it is the only type of blockage that can be overcome by any writing exercise. No kidding ! Forget for a moment what you’re writing about and give yourself a new challenge: write down what would happen if the end of the world happened here, now, right away. Or the sequel to Gone with the Wind or Twilight (well, a few scenes), just for the pleasure of putting characters you already know so well back into the saddle that they will be happy to tell you about them their story. You can also let yourself imagine how the person you hate most in the world becomes a character in your next novel (or short story, or play, or screenplay…) and in what impossible situation you will try to immerse them. .

You have lots of ideas, but no way to write anything coherent

Two possibilities: either you found an absolutely brilliant idea, but after three pages it completely knocks you out; either you thought you had found a great idea for a professional ghostwriting services, after thirty pages of pure writing joy, you realize that in fact it would be perfect… for a short story. Alas, three times alas, very often the ideas which excite us the most are precisely those which turn out to be damp squibs (there must be a law in the universe which bears a name to illustrate this sad observation). This is the harsh reality and there is nothing to do about it, there is no need to insult the whole world: all you have to do is open a new file. The good news is that often, when you feel like you’ve wasted your time developing a story idea that flops, there’s another idea hiding behind it and that one… is the right one . Yay.