HOW I WRITE PREVIEW

It has occurred to me that though how people approach writing various subjects, genres, and, for lack of a better word, things, has similarities, it also has differences. So the next several weeks, I will be blogging about how I approach and "do" the things I write.

This is what I have in mind:

• Website copy writing
• Essays
• Poetry
• Novels
• Personal narrative or memoir
• Articles
• Blogs
• Social media posts
• Emails
• Journals

Today I'll talk a bit about how I approach my writing practice. I would love to say that I wake up every morning at five a.m., get right to writing, and have dozens of brilliant pages of copy by ten a.m. But, alas, that is not true. When I was working on one novel, I did get up an average of four mornings each week at 6:30 a.m. and wrote for a couple of hours before having to go to my at-the-time out-of-the-house job, but I did it reluctantly. Most mornings the only thing that motivated me to get out of bed was the thought of my rotting, pre-programmed coffee.

Nowadays, between taking graduate classes, doing volunteer work for Midwest Writing Center, and carting kids, I am a full-time writer. Though I am a full-time writer now, I'm always intending to spend more time actually writing. With a couple of recent regularly paying gigs, that is happening to a degree. As far as my writing practice, I really have no set schedule and no set routine.

I keep a three week spreadsheet of my days broken down into two hour blocks from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. that I fill in with my planned activities. This helps me to meet my deadlines and fit everything I want or need to accomplish into my schedule. It is a fluid and flexible plan so I probably never follow it exactly, but I know if I get groceries when I was scheduled to work on my blog, I'd better swap somewhere. I also keep a calendar with specific lists of tasks to complete in the week; I go by the week since my aforementioned general schedule changes so frequently.

Whether I write long hand with pen and paper or on the computer varies by what I'm working on. Generally, though, I type anything concrete I'm writing like an article but will go long hand for poetry and journal writing. I probably do write every day but not creatively and not always in the project where I want to be, but it is a process and work in progress. That's one of the great things about writing; if it doesn't work one way, you try something else.

Happy writing. I hope you enjoy my upcoming posts!

-The Wordsy Woman