Everyone is fascinated by workflow…I know one of the things I look forward to when I read about other writers is their process: the number of words or pages they write a day, where they write them, whether they outline or not. It’s only natural – we’re intrigued by how other people accomplish the very things we hope to succeed in as well.
I know I believed for a long time that I needed a certain block of uninterrupted time in a quiet (magical) space in order to create and write. In fact, that inability to carve out either that time or just as importantly that space was often my best excuse for not writing at all. Then, I discovered a great little application called Dropbox (and no, this isn’t an ad for DropBox). Storing everything I was working on in the “cloud”, and being able to virtually carry my writing with me, without the need for a laptop or iPad or thumbdrive, freed me from the need for a space, because wherever I was became my writing “office” – I was always in contact with my writing and my tools. With Dropbox, if I had a few free moments over lunch, I could call up what I was working on (plus any notes), and just bang out a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs. Using Dropbox reminded me that I don’t need a particular space or time to get my writing done – I just needed a little bit of time, whenever and where ever I could find it.
It’s silly to think that a computer app fundamentally changed how I approached my writing. I want to think that A SHARPER DARK and TAIGA and the other things I’m working on would have gotten to the finish line whether I had discovered Dropbox or not. Instead, it’s a symbol for what I really discovered during the last two years of my furious activity: I just needed to do the work, and worry less about how it got done.
For whatever it’s worth, though, here’s my process now: I try to get about 1100 words done a day, and I give myself one day off a week. I used to write predominately at night, but now I do it in the morning before heading off to work. And If I can, I might try to get a little more in before going to bed. I don’t mind stopping in “mid-thought”, because that gives me a decent starting point the next day. And when I sit down for the day, I only give a cursory glance at what I did the day before, just enough to “prime the pump”, because I don’t want to fall too far down the rabbit hole of reworking, revising and editing. The key is forward progress – slow, steady, but always forward.
And where do I write? Wherever I can…
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