As we jump feet first into the holiday season, the many tasks and traditions often interrupt our writing commitments.
Writing Tip for Today: Here are tips to help you keep writing during the busy holiday season.
BIC Still Works
If you’ve set yourself a writing schedule, the holidays can disrupt your good intentions. You have recitals, services, shopping, wrapping, parties and other time sucks to deal with. Yet if you keep even a skeleton of your writing schedule, you can still make progress.
Do give yourself some grace—there are only so many hours in a day. But even an hour here or there keeps your writing juices going and gives you a sense of continuity. If your regular writing sessions are late at night, try writing a little in the early evening. If you’re an early bird, get up an hour earlier and get your Butt in Chair.
If your session involves drafting new material, don’t try to edit at the same time. I suggest drafting one scene per session if your time is limited. On a different session, do only editing. Keeping your purpose to one thing may help you concentrate and produce more word count.
Editing Rings
On days when you are self-editing (See my post on Self-editing), try to start with more of a structural edit or “Big Picture” areas that need fixing. It won’t help to screen for adverbs if the scene itself is weak or confusing.
Ask yourself what the purpose of the scene is—maybe even jotting down in a sentence or two to remind yourself. The purpose of any scene is to deal with a problem or obstacle the Main Character faces on the way to the overall goal. Look for tension building as the scene progresses. If your character wins too easily, the readers’ interest may flag.
If you’ve already done a Big Picture edit, on subsequent sessions you can smooth out sentences, evaluate dialogue to narrative ratio and be able to say if your character wins or loses the scene goal or purpose. I always leave small things like “nits” or grammar for last. Fix up your scene first, so that tension builds and readers stay engaged.
Don’t make writing go to the end of the line.
Ha-Ha-Ha or Ho-Ho-Ho
Holidays are stressful for most of us. If you stress out because you can’t fit writing time into your day, get creative. If you have kids, take a tablet with you to write a bit while they’re busy jumping on trampolines or other activities. I love those bounce places—they have supervision so that I can write for an hour while the kids jump around.
If you’re frustrated by the busyness, you might need a short writing sesh just to clear your head. Write a poem about your in-laws or the “IT” gift that is sold out already. Imagine how your novel character would react at this same time of year and then write such a scene. Write a rant on social media and then delete it before you post.
Most of all, don’t make writing go to the end of the line. Give your writing the dignity of occupying a special place in your life. And if the season gets the better of writing, remember that it will be New Year’s Eve before you know it. Then you can hunker down and finish that novel, that memoir or that article.
