18 Days of Writing and Publishing Tips – Day 12: Six Strategies for Procrastinators

If you have trouble actually starting to write, here are a few different strategies I’ve used to begin to get words on paper. Believe me, I never want to actually start writing. It’s a real effort to force myself. I’d happily just think about my stories forever without bothering to type in a word if that was an option.

Write mostly dialogue at first. I use this strategy most often. It’s easier for me to envision people talking, and then if necessary, I throw in a descriptive sentence to help the dialogue make sense. I don’t worry about writing pretty sentences at this point. I’m basically laying down a framework. This also have the benefit of keeping the plot moving. I like to write fast-paced stories and this way I don’t get too bogged down in extra description in a place where dialogue could have been used instead.Write any scene that inspires you. You don’t have to write in order. I wrote most of GONE BY NIGHTFALL in pieces because I couldn’t decide on the order I wanted events to happen. I used Scrivener for some of it. Scrivener, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a writing software that helps keep track of different scenes and different characters. You can get it for a free trial and it’s worth checking out to see if it helps your particular writing method.If writing dialogue doesn’t work, describe the setting of each scene first. Sometimes having a clear picture of the characters’ surroundings makes the dialogue flow better and you can figure out how they are interacting both with each other and with the surroundings in the scene.Tell yourself you only have to write 100 words and they don’t have to be good ones. 100 words is manageable, and you might find once you have those down, you can write more. If you can’t, walk away and come back later to write another 100 words.Record yourself telling what happens in scene as if you were describing it to a friend, then play it back and see what you can use to actually put into words.Keep expanding out from your outline, sentence by sentence until you’ve built a scene. Check out the Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson. He describes a step-by-step process that many use, if not to write a whole book, to at least get part of it done.

If you’ve missed my other writing tip posts, check out post 1 here.

And here are the books in my sci fi Torch World series, for which I used all these strategies to actually finish: