Have you ever felt worse about yourself after you’ve written?  Even if it’s terrible?  My guess is your answer is no.  When you’ve felt worse is when you know you should be writing…and you don’t – there’s the pain.

It’s the same as the gym, you suck it up and go, after that you feel better.  Or, you make up a reason not to go and live with the short term pain of regret.

To finish the headline above:

“Writing is fun, it’s the not writing, the staring at the screen, procrastinating and trying to make yourself start that’s miserable.”

Now, just go write a few sentences and see where that takes you.

J

You all know this but sometimes it needs to be reinforced.  Your first draft will be lacking, if not terrible.  Easy to get discouraged, move on to another task, or throw in the towel all together after reading it.

However…this is the nature of the game.  All the greats (Hemingway to Stephen King) have admitted this.  If the titans of this biz have terrible first drafts so will you.  Accept it, embrace it, use it to your advantage.  Get the first draft written, out of your soul and on to the paper…then you can craft your masterpiece from the foundation you’ve built underneath.

So the answer to the headline question is obvious: just write.  Writing is rewriting, this is a basic rule of the trade you’ve chosen, now go fire it up.

When you’ve done your first draft, then edited it, edited it again, and again…you’ve probably smoked out some plot kinks, maybe some structural flaws, and smoothed out some inconsistencies.  You might call this a macro or big picture edit.  Now it’s time to get into the weeds.

Do a search for words ending in “ly”, take them out unless absolutely necessary (like the one I just used).  Adverbs don’t move the story forward, they accent something that shouldn’t need accenting: strong words.

Do a search for the phrase “the fact that” and restructure it.  Any sentence with this in it can be shortened by at least three words and made stronger.

Search for the word “also”, usually signifying the passive voice.  Reword.

Strength lies in brevity and action, not in more words.  Now go fire it up.

Recovering from a fall off a ladder.  Am I telling you this for sympathy?  Not really, if you want to feel bad for me that’s fine, but my real message here is I discovered the hospital is a terrible place to write.

We all think, “Oh, if I just had some quiet time, some guilt free time off then I could really write.”  Wrong.  If you can’t write now, you won’t write in the hospital, on vacation or at the beach on that day off.

I have no excuses, and neither do you…the only solution is to do what the greats did, and do…write, rewrite, write some more.  It will start out bad, make you question your validity, and then somehow turn into something you’re proud to call your own.  And that my friend, is why you’re here in the first place.  Onward.

it’s hard.  Write because you like to write.  If you want someone to buy your art it has to be good, has to move them, has to reach in and touch them.  The only way you’re going to do that is moving yourself, reaching inside yourself and putting it on the page.  When you stop thinking of the end result i.e. a check, an award, a deal…and concentrate on the body of work, a funny thing will happen – the end result gets closer, maybe in a different form, but it’s there.

It’s like the old inner game books on tennis or golf, the minute you focus on the stroke or swing a different part of your brain kicks in and actually works against what you desire.  If you let the subconscious take over the brain will reach down and deliver to you what you need – also know as being in the zone.

Get in the zone, and deliver – it’s why you got in this gig in the first place.

J

If you’ve seen this movie you know what I’m talking about.  If not, go watch it.  What you’ll realize is that any excuse not to write is just that, an excuse.  The other day I was writing in the library and couldn’t get MS Word to fire up-we’ve all been there right?  So easy to waste time diagnosing, tinkering, fidgeting.

Not good.  Opened up a text file and wrote in that.  Write when you can, with what you have.  Your drive for writing should be such that you would write on a grocery bag with a crayon if that’s what was available.  Or, as in the movie, with something much worse, on something much more fragile.  Get it down however you can, make it look pretty later.  Now, go fire it up.

It has been proven that exercise does as much for your brain as it does for your body.  If you need proof just read John Ratey’s book  Go Wild.

The other side of the coin is the thinking, cognition and imagination that it takes to string a few pages together daily is enough workout for your brain to actually expand its capacity, at the same time getting you further in your creative endeavor.

When you’ve worked yourself into a habit of regular creative pursuit you can feel the difference in your conscience, your being and your vision.

So to tie this all together, if exercising regularly is as simple as getting the appropriate clothes and gear on, then writing regularly should be as simple as sitting in front of the keyboard.  Neither one are that simple, but you can’t do them without putting on your shoes or opening the document.  Action first, motivation later – it is always that way.  Fire it up.

There are so many bells and whistles with MS Word that it’s easy to get caught up in the font and appearance rabbit hole, eating up hours of otherwise productive writing time.  There are several apps or downloads that can provide you a clean interface for writing and a simple Google search or a visit to Lifehacker.com will show you these.

However…since most of us write on Word they have addressed this issue.  You’re most likely already aware of “read-mode” under the view tab which gets you an almost distraction free writing surface.  You can take it a step further by clicking the down arrow in the quick access toolbar on the top left and do the following:

More commands/choose commands from/commands not in ribbon/toggle full screen view/add.

This will add a new icon to the top left which can give you the cleanest writing surface, push esc key to return.

Now…you’ll need to find something else to distract you from writing-stack the deck in your favor.  Happy writing.

doing something, than to be tired from doing nothing.  The feeling of having done it surpasses any hedonistic pleasure you get from putting it off.  It can even generate energy you didn’t even know you have.  It’s like an engine, we can sit in the car and wait for it to take us somewhere, or we can turn the key, put it in gear, apply the gas….and momentum takes over.

It’s the same with you… turn the key, in gear, gas…you know the rest.