Building Your Writing Muscle

Building your writing muscle

I sometimes have those moments that I just can’t face writing. It almost like a phobia. I desperately want to write because I know once it I will feel better but the dread of opening a manuscript and being faced by blank space.

I had it bad at the beginning of the year, I have a part started YA novel which I love but I have no idea where it is going. Added to this was a lack of space in my head to hold a whole new world in it to work out what to do with it.  Every time I opened the file I panicked and started gradually to lose my confidence.

I was telling Liz about this, about how I knew I needed to write for my own sanity but that the book was just making me more insane. She came up with a brilliant suggestion. For January I should use a story prompt every day and try and write something. It didn’t matter what it was, a story, a piece of description I just needed to write.

Now this sounded good, I would be working my writing muscles but there was no pressure of trying to create a novel. So I started slowly first with a suggestion from Liz and then with suggestions from my blog and Facebook.

I found myself writing in bed at night and looking forward to what prompt I had and where it would take me.

The freedom was amazing, I created characters and stories and places. The pieces ranged from sexy short stories to dystopian futures; from the heart breaking to the silly. And weirdly most were adult rather than YA.

Now it is February I have completed two of the short stories and they need some polishing before I send them out into the world. I am working on a novella set in Colorado and I have the start of a dystopian novel. Hopefully by the time my non-writing life calms down I’ll be ready and in shape to carry on my YA novel.

How do you keep your writing muscle strong?

Come back on Sunday and hear from Susanna

Props and Prompts

(Image from teaorchai.com)

I'm a procrastinator. Generally I will do just about anything to avoid sitting down to work. Therefore I've evolved a certain routine to get me writing, prompts that tell me 'It's Work Time' rather than 'It's Muck Around On Twitter Time'. The idea is that if you do the same thing every time you sit down to work, your subconscious will get itself into work mode and it will be ready to go. This is particularly useful when you don't work in an office, but rather a cluttered corner of your own home.

Over the years I've tried lots of writing prompts. I have a spray bottle of scent, for example, that I can spray around when I am seriously distracted, with the idea that the smell will remind me to be productive. (This one doesn't work so well, because I like the smell so much that I often spray it around when I'm not working, too. Thereby confusing my subconscious mind, but improving the atmosphere of my house.)

My most basic essential prompt is a cup of tea. I've tried doing this with a glass of water instead, since it's so important to drink lots of water, but for some reason only a hot beverage really works. It's either a cup of jasmine green tea (if I'm off caffeine) or a cup of PG Tips with milk, preferably strong enough to leave tannin rings on everything it touches.

I get through a frankly obscene amount of tea every working day.

My other habitual prompt is music. I make a sound track for every book I write—usually it's an organic thing, that grows as I write the book, but sometimes I plan it out in advance—and I only listen to that music when I'm writing, or thinking about my book. Other times, I play the radio or listen to other CDs. This works even better than the tea, and I know this because it works in reverse, too. I can have a cup of tea any old time and I don't always think about my book; but if I hear one of the songs on my soundtrack when I'm away from my desk, say on the radio or the TV, I immediately think about my characters. If I've got my iPod on shuffle and one of my soundtrack songs comes up, I'm transported back to the world of my story, even if the song is from the soundtrack to a book I wrote years ago.

To be accurate, I guess that my tea is a writing prop, whereas my soundtrack is a writing prompt. (That extra m and t make all the difference.)

What are your writing props, or prompts?

Come back on Thursday when Anna will be posting...