writing challenge

Are You a Sprinter or a Marathoner?

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people try their hands at writing 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November, as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month).

The success and popularity of NaNoWriMo is a testament to the power of the writing sprint. You can accomplish a great deal when you focus on a single writing task and work to a major deadline.

But how do you translate this success into a sustained writing life? A former NaNoWriMo participant, Amber, sent me this email:

I wrote 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo in 19 days, but I was toast for a week after I finished. I want to finish my next first draft and I know that a steady pace is key, but I have a problem being consistent. As much fun as those fits of inspiration are, the rest of the world falls away when I get to writing like that and some of my other priorities get left by the wayside.

How do I utilize that inspiration to make progress on my drafts without neglecting the rest of my responsibilities? And how do I consistently update even when I feel tapped out?

Amber makes a great point: We cannot live by sprints alone. If you want to be a writer and also remain sane or maintain a day job, you need a different approach. The demands of everyday life can drain our enthusiasm for the big writing project.

May I suggest something that works for me?

Writing as Interval Training

In exercise, interval training is the practice of doing short bursts of heavy work, alternated with longer periods of steady exertion. You might jog for two minutes and run for one, for example. Apparently, it’s a great way to maintain fitness: you push yourself, but not to exhaustion.

In writing, I’m a firm believer in daily practice, and a steady pace. But as a nonfiction writer, I’m not always working on a book manuscript. Often I’m researching, or incubating ideas, or blogging. I’ll continue at a steady pace through outlining and early drafting.

At some point, I need to commit to intense work to finish a complete draft. I sprint.

My writing life looks like a kind of interval training: months of steady work and research, then a month-long sprint completing the first draft. Steady work, then immersion, then steady work again.

What would interval writing look like for you?

If you’re struggling to find your writing pace, consider using intervals.

For example, commit to a short session on your draft every day, say 30-45 minutes, six days a week. This keeps your mind working on the book, but also lets you lead a normal life.

Then schedule concentrated bursts to make serious progress. Take one afternoon a week or weekend a month to do nothing but write. Maybe, like me, you’ll have longer sprint intervals, more widely spaced.

The interval approach gives you the best of both worlds:

• The steady feeding of the Muse through daily practice
• The motivation and progress that comes from an imminent deadline

Have a Writing Challenge of Your Own?

This blog post originated from a writing challenge that a subscriber sent me. (Thanks, Amber!)  Have a writing challenge of your own? Send it to me by email, in the comments, or using the Contact form.

• Find insight on scheduling work and juggling different projects in The Writer’s Process.
• Watch the writing challenge videos.

 

How do you cope when writing ideas rain down faster than you can catch them? How do handle a creative Muse that delivers batches of writing ideas at inopportune times, like packages that pile up on your doorstep while you’re on vacation?

Like summer fruit, inspiration can spoil if left unattended too long.

The Creative Writer’s Challenge

Sometimes inspiration hides from writers, other times it comes all at once. While this may seem like a good problem to have, when you’re in the midst of the flood, it can be overwhelming.

My new friend Peri described the situation as follows:

“I awakened this morning after a night of fitful coughing, vowing that I would surrender to the demands of a miserable cold and just rest. Moments later, I got up to drink some water and got caught in a rainstorm. Ideas were pelting me so hard and fast that I couldn’t capture them all for a morning free write or the so-called future (sometimes aka ‘never’) file.”

Although these downpours are rare for me, I understand her problem. My personal Muse likes to pipe up with ideas at awkward times, like:

• 5am in the morning, when I need another two hours of sleep
• While I’m in the shower
• During a long drive

The problem isn’t having too many ideas – it’s retrieving them later, when you’re ready to write.

How do you store those ideas so they are available later?

The standard advice is to carry around a notebook or use a note application on your phone. It’s good advice, as far as it goes. But sometimes, those little reminders you make for yourself aren’t enough. As Peri writes,

“Sometime the notes I jot down are vague or strange, and I have no idea how to return to the particular and nuanced threads my busy brain was following.”

Yep – I’ve been known to scribble words on paper, only to be completely mystified by them a few days later.

The half-life of a creative spark is remarkably short.

Here are a few ideas for preserving your creative inspiration.

Capture the Outside Details

Writing down a single word or two may not be enough to restore the full inspired idea to your head. Memory doesn’t work that way.

According to Benedict Cary, author of How We Learn:

“The brain does not store facts, ideas, and experiences like a computer does, as a file that is clicked open, always displaying the identical image. It embeds them in networks of perceptions, facts, and thoughts, slightly different combinations of which bubble up each time.”

Take advantage of those networks of perceptions to retrieve the memory of the idea. When jotting down the bones of the idea, also note other things about the context in which it occurred. Where were you when you thought of this idea? How did you feel? What other things had you been thinking about or working on?

These contextual details may help you retrieve the complete idea later. If nothing else, they can put you back into a similar state of mind.

Use a Voice Recording

Instead of writing your insight down, turn on the recorder on your phone and talk about. Dedicate one minute to capturing the thought. You will probably record more detail and structure than you would simply writing down a few words.

As a bonus, talking through the concept before you put it aside makes the memory of it easier to retrieve.

Change Your Surroundings

Creative insights are the products of associative thought processes that link disconnected things. You may need to get into a similar state of mind to recall the entire concept.

When sitting at the desk in “hard work” mode, you’re in a different mindset than you were when you came up with the thought. So change it up. If your scribbled notes leave you cold, try changing your environment.

Get away from the office. If it’s convenient, return to the activity you were doing when you first got the idea. Otherwise, take a walk. Put your mind in a state of open attention while gently pondering the words or idea.

Be patient, but don’t wait too long to do this.

The research on learning shows that even when we try to memorize something, it fades pretty quickly – a day or two for your first exposure to a fact.

Even if you write down a word or two, don’t rely on those notes for too long. That leads me to the next idea:

The Daily Writing Practice

Here’s another reason to have a committed practice of writing each day – you can use the regular session to write down and explore those bits of inspiration that popped up since the last time, or to explore the results of a flood of creativity.

You may find that some of the ideas that seemed brilliant are not worth pursuing. That’s okay. The act of working through them reminds your creative self to keep the flow of ideas coming.

Related Posts

How We Learn: A Book Review

Video: Saving Your Best Ideas for Later

Managing the Muse

 

Follow your passion.

That advice is thrown around like beads at Mardi Gras. But catching the passion – well, that can be much trickier.

The advice is not terribly helpful. Worse, it makes people feel like they are somehow empty, meaningless beings if they don’t know what their passion is.

If the lack of ‘passion’ is keeping you from writing, then that’s something we should address.

“I lack passion”

I ask new subscribers to my Writing Practices email list to send me their writing challenges. One honest subscriber responded with this.

“I have plenty of time, plenty of ideas. However, I lack passion. There’s no energy, no sense of making a difference.”

Plenty of ideas but no passion! Let’s dig into this problem for a moment, because I suspect many of us may have felt it at some point.

Passion By Any Other Name

In the context of writing, passion might mean many things:

1. A sense of purpose (my writing makes a difference)
2. Sheer love of the thing that you’re doing (if I don’t write, I’ll explode)
3. Excitement about the subject (this subject gets me fired up)

I think that my subscriber meant #1 – the sense of purpose. She wanted to do writing that had meaning to the world, that made a difference.

Don’t we all?

Create your own passion and purpose.

Making a difference on a global scale may be out of the realm of possibility for most of us. But making a difference in another person’s life, touching a reader, offering a moment of insight or transcendence? That’s within reach.

You’ll never discover those possibilities unless you dive into the work.

To Find Your Reason, Write

Like inspiration, a sense of purpose or passion doesn’t usually descend on us while we’re sitting on the couch. It arrives once we are involved in the work and begin to see its possibilities.

Waiting for passion to strike is a fool’s game. Passion for your writing is discovered and cultivated.

Action triggers passion. Work reveals purpose.

Find an Other-Focused Purpose

As you dive into the writing, focus on the ideal reader for your work.

Focusing on the reader keeps me going when the work is tough – and always makes the end result better.

• If you’re writing fiction, imagine a reader who would love reading what you’re writing, or feel  a connection with the story.
• If you’re writing nonfiction, what problems are you trying to solve? Why is someone going to read what you offer? How can you help someone?

Find a greater good beyond yourself that you can serving with your writing. It makes your writing better while delivering much-needed motivation.

A Purpose Exercise

If you lack a sense of purpose, try this: Write every day for 30 days.

You don’t have to publish your work, or polish and refine it. Commit to writing something – a draft of a blog post, part of a book, an idea for an article – every day for 30 days.

Some days will feel terrible. Other days you may feel a spark of inspiration. You might start to accumulate ideas. You may even find yourself getting excited about some of them.

If you find something interesting at the end of the first month, commit the next 30 days to developing the idea.

It’s okay if your focus shifts and changes. In fact, that probably will happen. Keep thinking about the readers you want to reach and what they need.

You get the idea. Start writing and see if you find something that gets you fired up, gives you a sense of purpose, or makes a difference.

Perhaps you’ll start to find joy in the learning and discovery of writing. Or when you share you words with others, you may discover that you can have an impact.

You’ll never know unless you’re writing.

Want to Share Your Writing Challenge?

Send me your writing challenge using the Contact form on this site. I can’t guarantee that I can solve your challenge, but I will try to propose a workaround. And maybe you’ll inspire another blog post that helps others facing the same situation. How’s that for giving you a sense of purpose?