Lessons Learned as an Author Continued Again

Another lesson I’ve learned as an author is that thereare many different ways to write. When I started writing at the age of 56, Icame across a book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s an excellentbook on creativity. Julia has a technique called Morning Pages which is towrite three hand written pages first thing in the morning. These pages can beanything: your journal, a shopping list or whatever and are a way to get thecreative juices flowing for the day. I modified her concept and would reviewwhere I left off in my current manuscript and write three handwritten pages ofthe story first thing in the morning. When I came home from my day job, I’d putthose three pages into the computer, editing along the way. This produced twotyped pages a day. If you do the arithmetic, in 150 days I’d have a rough draftfor a 300-page novel. In fact, this is the way I wrote my first four publishednovels. Then when I retired in 2007, I modified my approach and wrote eachmorning directly into the computer. I wrote every morning except if I was doingan event or had a family activity. Doing this until we moved back to SouthernCalifornia in 2015, I completed a number of manuscripts, some of which havebeen published. Since then, I have been primarily in editing mode and now havetwenty-two published books with more to come.