How to keep a writing routine
A lot of you have been asking about mine
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A routine can sound like a real downer, especially when your goal is to become a Romantic and Important Artist.
Well, call me a downer (you wouldn’t be the first), but I happen to like my writing routine. It reduces the work of figuring out when or how I’m going to chip away at such ambitious goals. It also alleviates the anxiety that NOT ENOUGH IS HAPPENING FOR MY GOALS TO MATERIALIZE.
With that, here’s how I go about keeping one.
Step 1 is have a routine
A routine doesn’t need to be complicated. I pick a day or a time and perhaps a target (minutes logged, words written, until I get to this plot point, until lunch). It can always change. Granted, changing it a lot kinda undermines the whole routine aspect.
My current routine entails waking before five and sneaking downstairs to drink coffee, glorious coffee, eat eggs, and write for 20 minutes. Waking that early might sound freakish, but it works for me right now. I’ve always liked to write first thing in the morning because my evil internal editor is quiet and my brain can noodle more freely.
Lately I appreciate the morning even more because if I don’t rise early, I have no moment or thing just for myself in a given day, because I recently had a baby and have started back at work.
Not everyone is a morning person, or can keep a regular structured time. Even for me, the baby sometimes wakes up early and my time is interrupted. This brings me to point number two.
Be cool when the routine fails
A lot of writers preach “butt in chair,” meaning you must sit and put in the time to write, daily if possible. Obviously I kinda subscribe to this. In large part because I like writing and don’t want to miss a day of it. At this point, it’s become like a meditation for me. It chills me out. It makes me happy. I imagine golf does similar things for some people.
Regardless, I say butt anywhere because I can’t always be in the perfect writing setting. Sometimes it has to happen on my phone while I’m sitting under a sleeping baby. Or, pre-baby—because this applied then too—while I commuted to work on the bus.
Butt anywhere also means the creative process can occur in the shower or on a walk. I often go for walks and wind up sending myself a lot of texts with spontaneous ideas for edits or new pieces.
Shop online
This brings me to a possibly controversial opinion that the creative process is even happening while I mindlessly scroll. Seriously, I’ve noticed that when I get very obsessed with finding some particular article of clothing and can’t stop hunting for the perfect one, ideas seem to get worked out elsewhere in the back of my mind? I think it’s a matter of giving my brain time to rest, which is almost as important as putting it to work.
Embrace the shitty first draft…or shitty first year
Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird famously extols the benefits of embracing a shitty first draft. The idea is that you silence your evil internal editor to crank something out. It will undoubtedly be shitty, but shitty is better than the nothing you produce when you sit in front of a blank page hating every thought in your head. At least when you have something shitty, you and your internal editor, who is actually an evil genius, can work together to improve it.
I’m a proponent of the shitty first draft mindset, and I think it can apply more broadly, too. When I started up my daily practice, everything I wrote was absolute trash. For about a year. Maybe two. I honestly don’t know why I kept at it, but I’m glad that I did. There’s a reason it’s called a practice. I think I had to write trash for a year or two to get to a place where I could write stuff I really enjoy, as I have in the years since.
Treat unproductive days like bad weather
They both pass. Particularly if I’m showing up consistently to my routine.
When I have days where I don’t know what I’m saying or how to untangle a knot, I don’t stress too much. At this point I’ve had plenty of these kinds of days and have always found my way through. I trust that will happen again.
Sometimes all I do in a given day is open my laptop, look at the thing I’m stuck on, then close my laptop and go on with my day. Later I’ll be shopping for cool socks and the solution will pop in my head.
Be social, but maybe not TOO social
A good writing buddy can be a first reader for your work…something I’m still kinda loath to bother people to do.
A lower stakes way I’ve engaged with writing buddies is to become accountability partners. This just means we log the minutes we write each day in a Google sheet. It’s not about creating a feeling of competition, or that some productivity judge is looking over my shoulder. It’s more that someone else is in it with me, egging me on. It’s definitely motivated me to log something, even just five minutes, every day.
Some days I’ve logged zero, which is still reflective of the fact that I’m ~thinking~ about writing. (I don’t make that a regular excuse though.)
At the same time, I do credit isolation with some of my productivity. It’s no coincidence that I wrote my first long form work while sheltering in place. Also, during the pandemic, we moved out of state. I’ve probably been a little lonely and turned to imaginary friends (see photo) to cope…but look at my word count!
Let things sit
I am impatient but I’ve learned the hard way that good writing needs to age, like wine, or my rugged good looks.
When I finish a draft, I feel like a superstar. I want to send it out to the Paris Review. But I don’t. I set it aside. I work on something else for at least two weeks. THEN I come back to the first piece. I always see ways I can improve it and am so glad I paused. I revise a new draft and put it aside for two weeks. I try to do this a couple times, more than I think necessary.
Eventually I come back to a piece, read it, read it out loud for good measure, and get the feeling it’s ready. If I’m at least 80% confident about this, I start submitting it. Just recently, I got a piece published whose first draft I wrote back in 2015/2016!
Note that this isn’t necessarily my approach with Substack, but that’s because I have a different goal in mind here, and it’s basically to put myself out there more, take some silly risks. Maybe I will write about silly risks at some point.