Changing Your Scene Can Help You Write Them or Leaving The Creative Nest

This is my usual writing routine. I wake up, grab a pen and my journals and start writing. I do not even get dress before I’ve written a thousand words. It’s a rule. Every writer figures out what works for them and once you do, you don’t mess with it. What works for me is to write things out long hand, that is draft one. Then I type what I wrote that morning, making changes big and small in wording and tone. That’s draft two. After that, I take advantage of the speech function on my laptop and refine things for a third go around. It’s only after all of that that my editor gets to see it and make her comments. Today, well, I just didn’t do that. Instead, I got about two thirds of my word count done and then I watched Poldark episodes on Masterpiece that were on my recorded list. Then I took a long bath, went to lunch and came to the library. I finished the last third of my word count for the day here as well as listening to a lecture on addiction as part of my research for this book. Now, I’m writing out my blog post, very early, and will probably pick out a movie and go home. The best part is, I don’t feel stressed about it. To keep the feeling, I am looking for something focus on after I end the retreat, and I decided that I’m going on a time diet.

What, you may ask, is a time diet. Well, it is a decision to be conscious of all of the comments that you make to yourself about time. That means focusing on all of those off-hand comments that we say aloud or wind up as part of the non-stop dialogue that goes on inside the secret world of your head. It’s based on the idea, not mine but Gay Hendricks from his book The Big Leap, that our society looks at time as this external force bearing down on us without mercy. He calls it Newton time. Hendricks suggests that instead you live in Einstein time. In that version, we are the ones creating time. It is an internal element that we have control over. I admit, it’s sort of a strange idea to wrap my head around, but when something makes speaks to your gut, you don’t argue. You go with it. I’m going with it. Besides, nothing can be as difficult as the convent stay, right?