Cynthia Morris

In The Busy Woman’s Guide to Writing a World-Changing Book, I talk about how to commit to a monogamous relationship with your book while writing it. Framing it as a relationship seems to help my clients.

We all know how exciting and fun the initial phases of a project is. Early ideation is thrilling. There’s often such a sense of rightness, of things clicking into place in our minds. It’s almost like we can see and feel the whole thing. Like the book already exists and our job is to pull it into form, one word, one sentence at a time.

These early days are heady, and the sense of possibility is intoxicating. This thrill is something we come to expect as the norm. But like any relationship, the honeymoon phase does end.

Drafting the book turns into revising the book. And here’s where it gets a little less fun. Editing is a different process than drafting. We confront our limitations as writers. We bump into confusion, and feel awkward as we wend our way toward clarity. Doubt seeps into the process, turning something we loved into something we may dread.

I remember this roller coaster of love for every book I have written. I remember being in the tub at the time I was writing my first book, thinking, oh, I need to put that thing in the book. But when I went to the manuscript, I had already put that in there. All the ideas I wanted to share felt like a swirly, jumbled mess.

Writing my novel took twelve years and seventeen drafts. It wasn’t all love and roses. It was humbling as I learned how to write a novel by actually doing it.

What I have learned, and what I teach my clients, is to look for the love in all the phases of the process. What’s to love about getting feedback and realizing there’s more work to do than you anticipated? Where’s the love in revising something so it truly speaks to what and how you want to communicate?

These phases of the process call us forth. They challenge is. It might not feel as thrilling as the initial idea, but there’s plenty to love there. When you find yourself bumping up against your limitations, ask yourself this: What’s to love here?

What helps you keep the love alive throughout all the phases of a project?  Share your thoughts below. 

We’ve heard the usual advice: write a certain amount of words daily. Keep a notebook to capture your ideas in one place. Write what you know. But what if some of the simplest things made for the best writing practice?

All this is good advice. And over time, I’ve seen that it’s the simplest practices that help make writing easy. I have used these myself and have witness students in my classes feel great success with these simple approaches.

Always apply my Adopt/Adapt approach. Adopt my suggestions and adapt them to suit you. If it’s not working, drop it and try something else.

Set a timer. You have probably sat down to write and found yourself bopping all around your email and the internet. A timer is the simplest thing of all but the best way to hold your focus. Set a timer for 10-15 minutes to get focused bursts of writing in.

Use a reflection process. At the end of each writing session, jot three words to describe your experience of writing. Don’t overthink it; just free-associate your experience quickly and briefly. Keep a list of these to see what your writing gives to you.

Give your words critical distance. After you’ve written something, set it aside for a day or so. Give it space to breathe and for you to step out of writing mode and into reader mode. You will see much more with space between you and the writing.

Write early. We all have our biorhythms that work for us. Knowing when to do things is key, as Dan Pink describes in his book When. No matter what your preferred time of day, I suggest getting your writing in as early as possible. Most of the people I work with report that they have more focus and energy earlier in the day. The later in the day the writing happens, the more it feels like a chore. Do your writing early in the day and enjoy the victorious feeling that gives you all day long.

Keep it together. If you haven’t already, create a container for your writing. It could be a notebook or a digital file. Gather notes, drafts, ideas and images in one place for easy reference. It doesn’t matter how messy the contents are, just that you have one container for your work. Ideally, it will be portable so you can access it everywhere.

You can also use the notebook as a progress log or way to capture your process. Sometimes we need to hash out our thoughts about our process or record information about our writing sessions—yay, gold star! Or add up our word count. We can log our ups and downs and have a record of what works and what doesn’t for the next book we write.

I prefer to use a notebook, and one of my favorites is the Diary Flex by Hahnemühle, which is refillable. There is also the cool Make My Notebook, which allows you to customize your cover and interior pages, seen above.

This is excerpted from my  book, The Busy Woman’s Guide to Writing a World-Changing Book. Subscribe to Impulses for sneak peeks and insider insights. 

Want to write but have a hard time capturing your ideas and knowing where to start? Make it easy peasy to free-write from your own prompts with a mind map.

Here’s a mini workshop on how to design your own writing practice so you can write what you want, when you want.