Two Changes

After wrestling with writing this year for six months (and mostly losing) I made two big changes to my process. At first I wasn't sure it would do anything to help me, but I kept at it. For the last eight weeks I've written at least 2.4K every day without fail, so I thought I'd look at what I changed, and why I think it worked.

The biggest change came out of necessity in dealing with the puppies: not working for eight to ten hours straight. My guy and I started taking shifts with the dogs, who needed to be watched at all times and house-trained when they were little. To accomodate this I split my writing sessions into first thing the morning for 3-4 hours, and then after dinner for 4-5 hours.

The effect on my work was immediate: I wrote more, and I wrote faster. I started setting goals for myself to see if I could reach them, and I did every day. I wrote 60K in October, and that novel is the best one I've written in a few years. I repeated that in November.

One physical side effect from splitting my sessions was that my neck stopped hurting as much, and I stopped wearing the cervical support collar I'd basically worn all the time for six months prior to the work change.

The other big change I made was to work on slow stitching and other meditative projects every day between my writing sessions. Usually I do my needlework at night after I finish my work day, but with the split sessioning I couldn't, so I switched to mid-day. Quilting and sewing help me focus and feel good about myself, and calm me down a lot, but I never thought to do this between writing sessions.

Anyway, the end result of making just those two changes is writing over 120K in eight weeks. It took me six months to write 60K before I made them, so this definitely got me back on track.