Changing Things Up

Welcome to 2017! 

I love beginnings. New days, new weeks, new months. Yes, I am someone who actually loves Mondays. On Monday, the week always holds possibility and the chance for something better than last week. I also love mornings for the same reason, and because of coffee. Mornings = Coffee, so how can they be bad?

And today is not only a Monday, it’s the first Monday of 2017. A new year, fresh and open to possibilities. A chance to change things up to meet goals.

Okay, I confess, I didn’t wait until the first of the year to change things. I started last Monday. I’m impatient like that. But since I made changes a week ago, I’m now an authority, so I can give advice.

The last couple of months, writing has been a struggle. Really, for the last year. I did complete a manuscript in 2016, but that happened because I took a week off from life and wrote like a fiend. Truthfully, I’ve found it increasingly difficult to work writing into my everyday life. My other responsibilities feel more important: homeschooling five children, feeding those same five children (even though they do a lot of the cooking, I still have to do the grocery shopping, some assisting, and fix a few meals), driving those children to activities, spending time with my husband, exercising. Yes, those responsibilities are all important, and I honestly enjoy them all too. (Except the tenth grocery store visit in a week. That I do not enjoy.) But I was giving these activities priority, which left me too tired to do the writing thing. I had the time to write, but not the mental energy. Sandwiching writing after homeschooling and exercising and before driving and feeding left me too drained. Those two to three hours became my downtime, NOT my writing time. So I decided something had to change.

A few years ago, I started making sure homeschooling happened first because it was the top priority, and for several years, that worked. Then that schedule stopped working. But because I had drilled into myself that I wasn’t motivated enough to succeed at homeschooling when it came second in my day, I took a really long time to address this problem and recognize that I needed to—and could—make a change. Not only that, but life had changed. My kids are older. Our school day isn’t filled with phonics and addition and crafts. I don’t need to be my freshest, most patient self because the subjects no longer try my patience (most days anyway). Writing can take the first of my day when I’m freshest and school the second half, when all I really need to do is check assignments, read, and ask questions.

So if you’re finding writing (or any other important task) not fitting into your life, here are a few tips to try changing things up.

1. Reevaluate Those Things In the Past That Didn’t Work: So you tried once a month cooking five years ago to give you a couple more hours in the evenings to write, but you ended up eating out too often because you consistently forgot to thaw the meals. Or you attempted to write during your child’s music lessons but you were constantly distracted by the teacher’s teaching and couldn’t focus. Just because these things didn’t work before doesn’t mean they can’t work now. Maybe you can tweak the idea to fit your life better, such as once a week cooking, so you can prep ingredients but keep them thawed in the fridge, or write in the car during music lessons since your child is older now. Don’t continue rejecting an idea simply because you tried it once and failed. You’ve changed. Your life has changed. So try again.
2. Think Outside the Box: For a while, I took a long nap in the afternoons. I got up in time to help with dinner, spend time with the family, and after the kids went to bed around 8ish, I wrote until midnight. Then I’d sleep until five-thirty, go to the gym, homeschool, and after lunch, nap again. It was like living two days every twenty-four hours. Day one was gym and homeschooling, Day two was family time and writing. And it worked. So try arranging your schedule unconventionally.
3. Don’t Give Up Too Soon . . . : When implementing a change in your life, don’t quit before giving it a realistic chance. If you’re getting up an hour earlier to write first thing in the morning, and by day three the newness has worn off and there isn’t enough coffee in the world to wake you up, don’t give up on the experiment. Keep setting your alarm. Keep programming your coffee pot. Keep making the change.
4. . . . But Don’t Be Stubborn About What Isn’t Working: If after a month of waking up early you’ve actually written LESS than before you tried writing in the mornings, reevaluate. Obviously, writing early in the day isn’t working. But maybe it’s only the writing muse that sleeps in while you actually find yourself awake and not hating the solitude of the quiet pre-life hours. If so, what could you do during that time that doesn’t require creative brain cells but would free up time later in the day when the words start flowing? 

Most of us are fitting writing into our lives around family and job and other obligations, and sometimes, the pieces stop fitting together. When that happens, don’t give up on a piece that isn’t fitting. Make a change instead. Try fitting those pieces together in a different way, build a new picture, and make a new beginning.

How to Leverage Your Personality to Bolster Your Writing Productivity

 
I recently attended a religious woman's retreat and during one of our sessions, we discussed our personality types. The Myers-Briggs test from the '50s is a wonderful way to figure out your strengths and weaknesses, what type of career would play out your natural gifts, and may other facets of life. As I explored a topic I've already studied in the past, I realized that the dry spell I've been having in my fictional writing might be due to the fact that I wasn't playing up the needs of my personality.


Re-discovering What Makes Me Feel Accomplished

I haven't changed a bit. That is to say, I've become great at adapting to life's curve balls, but I'm the same person I was ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. We all are unique, with quirks and needs that affect every part of our world. We have things that make us tick, that make us happy or content or even giddy. Those things can be leverage to make us productive and overflow with inspiration simply by being true to who we are and what works best for us.

Unfortunately, in the last few months, my inspiration well has been drier than a grain of Sahara sand at high noon. Focusing was impossible, words stopped up somewhere between brain and fingers, and I'm fairly certain intelligence chipped off and escaped my body. Lazy, bored, uninspired, and frustrated, I sat in front of a blank screen and stared, mentally begging the words to come.

Turns out, I'd been so wrapped up in life that I'd forgotten a fundamental part of who I am. Specifically, where I got my energy.

One of four parts of a personality according to the test I mentioned above is about how you recharge, how you gather yourself back to being okay. Do you need to be surrounded by people and socializing to feel whole, or do you prefer the quiet solitude to think and imagine?

I am an extrovert. The months I've spent cooped up in our rental, trudging through life in a infuriatingly silence were literally leaving me exhausted and empty. With a simple day retreat with other woman and a 20 point questionnaire, I realized my writing life won't ever be fulfilling if I don't let my need of people, of recharging with many others surrounding me, to be a regular part of it.

Additionally, the final element in my personality made me realize it may be time to take advantage of structure. A schedule, follow through, and completing small goals might help me feel more accomplished. I might even need to be a *gulp* plotter though I've proudly been a pantser for years. Perhaps the plotting will help me focus and complete projects.

I've taken a hold of these bits of myself and developed a plan that I hope will lead my writing in a forward motion. It may require creating my own real-life writing group since I can't find one. It may mean that I need to go to a bookstore or library to write instead of holing up in my office at home. You can do make your own plan once you know your personality type and examined your current habits against it.


Types and Tendencies

If you've never checked out what your personality is, even if you are very self aware, I'd highly recommend it. Insights such as this may help you develop a writing, plotting, or marketing campaign that works better for you than your current one. Keep in mind, some people take on roles or tendencies outside of their true personality, but this is about what is most comfortable or natural to you. Feel free to fill out this "knock-off" personality test (the Myers-Briggs one costs some money) that you can use to get a better sense of your strengths and weaknesses so you can leverage them for your writing.


The four categories used to analyze your personality are:

• Extrovert/Introvert - Do you get your energy recharge from group settings and the energy of others or from quiet time alone in personal or spiritual activities? 
• Regular in person critique groups will appeal to extraverts, while secluded or quiet writing time might appeal to introverts.

• Sensing/ Intuit - How do you take in information? Do you rely strictly on facts of the world around you or do you follow gut instincts?
• This can affect your research style or help you analyze critiques to better your manuscripts.

• Thinker/Feeler - Do you use logic or your feelings to process things?
• Thinkers may be more willing to ask questions of beta readers or feedback, while a feeler may need to take some time to process before replying.

• Judging/ Perceiving - How to you use the information and how important is structure in your life? Do you need a regular, scheduled routine or is spontaneity important to your process?
• The good ol' pantser/plotter come into play here. Do you need more structure than you realized previously? Deadlines are important to Judgers, while perceivers may consider deadlines flexible.

By knowing the way you best handle these elements, you can bend your writing time and process to better accommodate your writing.

Click to Tweet: "E.G. Moore discusses how your personality should affect your writing habits on @YAtopia_blog"

I'd love to know what you discovered! Please share your personality type and any ah-ha moments you may have had when you read about it in the comments below. Pinterest is also a great place to find out more about your type one you discover it. Just enter your four letter combination into the search bar, and have some fun.
 

E. G. Moore is a poet, freelance writer, and storyteller (the first of which her mom still has recorded on a cassette tape.)  She is a long distance member of For Pete’s Sake Writers Group in Washington, active in an email writer’s response group, and a Rocky Mountain Chapter SCBWI member. When she’s not telling “Mommy Made stories” to her two daughters or nagging her husband to edit her latest manuscript, she can be found off-roading in her suped-up ATV, baking some scrumptious bread, or in a long, plot-refreshing bubble bath. She’s represented by Jessica Schmeidler of Golden Wheat Literary. E.G. Moore tweets, posts on Facebook, and blogs at: www.emilygmoorewriter.blogspot.com

Which Way is Write?

There’s something I feel a lot of people forget what with all the advice flying around out there.

This is your dream. These stories are your stories.

Every single person approaches things differently. Each one of us has had experiences which shape the way we look at the elements that contribute to how and what we write.

So all of this: You should write every day. You should always plot. You should pants. You should only write when you feel like it.

None of those are absolutes. All of those pieces of advice are the sum of someone else’s experiences.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s a good idea to look at what has worked for people who’ve been through this whole thing before. But always remember – just because it worked for them, doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. Take the bits that do work for you, and mold them to your unique set of circumstances.

If you need to, pluck different parts from everywhere and make your own set of rules. Because ultimately, you have to figure out how you write best. And since no one else is you, no one can 100% definitively tell you how to write.

How to write? Sit down, and do so. But the when, the method – that you need to find out for yourself. Just like everything involved with writing, this takes time.

Remember it’s your dream – make sure you do it your way.

And in the end, it'll be worth it.

Writing Routine Experiment Results

If you missed my last post, for the past month, I’ve experimented with having a writing routine.

Results are in!

The first discovery I made is that I’m a terrible scientist. I went from my old ways to the new without first collecting data from the old. So how could I compare? Based off feelings? You bet. (Not very scientific, right?)

Here’s a recap of my experiment at the point where you saw it last:

Step one: Ask a question. Will sticking to a writing routine help me be a better writer or am I destined to live a wild existence of unpredictability for all of time?

Step two: Do background research. The old saying is that is takes 21 days to create a habit. But actually it takes 18-200-and-something days with an average of 66 days being the golden number. Basically, I could fall anywhere on this spectrum. We’ll see if 30 days is enough for me. 

Step three: Construct a hypothesis. By the end of these 30 days, the trial will either prove routine works for even the likes of me or that I’m a wild jungle babe of writing. 

Step four: Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. For the next 30 days, I will write in my glorified closet office–and only in that room. (I thought about doing it at a certain time, but then I started twitching and dry heaving and breaking out in hives, so I decided against that.)

And now, onto the rest of the scientific method...

Step five: Analyze your data and draw a conclusion. Blarg! What good is new data without old data? This is why I’m a writer and not a scientist. But I did make observations (based on feelings), at least. A few of those are:

Day One
Me: I’m going to write now.
Me: Better do that writing in your office.
Me: No, I’m sick. I’ll write cuddled on the couch.
Me: You can’t slack on day one of your experiment.
Me: Yes, I can. Because of the pressure in my head.
Me: ...
Me: Fine, but I’m hugging Oskimo (my stuffed bear) while I write in there.

Day Two
Hey, this aint even half bad. As long as I bring food.

Day Seven
Once again, I wanted to edit not in my office, but here I am. Coming in here does feel like a step toward productivity now.

After the first week, writing in my office felt natural. Week two went amazingly well.

And then somewhere in the middle of week three, I ended up writing in my living room because that’s where the window is and it was sunny. IT WAS SUNNY, OKAY? And then I always wrote by the window or out on the balcony. So...there was habit, just not the habit I set out to keep.

Step six: Communicate your results. I didn’t notice a difference in productivity in my office or in the sunshine. I got a ton done in both places. I went over my manuscript to apply final edits, handed it off to my critique partner, got notes for final final edits, and now I’m almost done with those. The only noticeable difference was that I was happier writing in the sun, and happiness is hella important.

Like Veronica Roth said, “Sometimes you do have to force yourself to do something, but it doesn't have to be in the same way as other people force themselves to do something.”

Moral of the story: Experiment and go with what feels right to you. As long as your writing is getting done and you’re moving forward, do what you do.

Happy writing!
Jessie
@Je55ieMullin5

Writing Routine Experiment

One of the most common pieces of writing advice is that we should have a writing routine. Why? Because routine flips that switch in our brain that says it’s time to get to work.

I’m not a creature of habit. At all. Sure, I may do the same things every day, but never in the same order. I like freedom.

I’ve tried (for like two days) to set writing routines in the past (only write at 2PM, only write while wearing a tie, etc.), but nothing ever stuck. I like what Veronica Roth said in her blog post about not following writer rules.

“In order to get the writing done, I have to feel free. I can't resent the work I'm doing. So I choose to look forward to it instead of dreading a particular time of day. I have found that, rather than making myself write at the same time every day, I make myself write at least once a day. It doesn't matter when that is or how much I get done. I just have to do it. Sometimes you do have to force yourself to do something, but it doesn't have to be in the same way as other people force themselves to do something.”

Mhmmm.

But I am pretty curious to see how a writing routine will–or will not--impact my writing. So for the next thirty days (until my next blog post on May 28), I’m going to experiment with this whole writing routine thing. I’m no science expert, so I’m going to approach this like a middle-school-level scientist.

Step one: Ask a question. Will sticking to a writing routine help me be a better writer or am I destined to live a wild existence of unpredictability for all of time?

Step two: Do background research. The old saying is that is takes 21 days to create a habit. But actually it takes 18-200-and-something days with an average of 66 days being the golden number. Basically, I could fall anywhere on this spectrum. We’ll see if 30 days is enough for me.

Step three: Construct a hypothesis. By the end of these 30 days, the trial will either prove routine works for even the likes of me or that I’m a wild jungle babe of writing.

Step four: Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. For the next 30 days, I will write in my glorified closet office–and only in that room. (I thought about doing it at a certain time, but then I started twitching and dry heaving and breaking out in hives*, so I decided against that.)

I have a couple questions for you. Do you have a routine? If so, what it is? If not, will you join me in experimenting?

Do you keep writing habits?

Yes. I'm a creature of habit.

No. I'm a wild jungle babe/dude.

pollcode.com free polls

I’ll see you back in a month with some super scientific results.

Over and out,
Jessie
@Je55ieMullin5

*Not really, but still.