Tag Archive for: new years resolution

Top Ten Writing Tips

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Top Ten Writing Tips

By Cathy Perkins
I can’t believe it’s already the middle of
January! How are you coming with your New Year’s Resolutions?
One of my resolutions was to transfer the
organization I always implemented in my day job to my writing life. Since my
writing space and habits were a bit (cough, a lot) disorganized, I got together
with some author friends. What quickly evolved was a set of writing tips. Many
of these I’ve done without conscious thought. I’m attempting to be more mindful,
however, and plan to use this structure as additional motivation to, as one
friend puts it, finish the damn book.

So, without further fanfare – the writing
tips:

Ten – Make lists. Every day I make a list of the things I
want to accomplish that day. (I’m not sure what it says about me that I love
drawing a line through an item when it’s done.)
The first line (every day but Sunday) is always, Write. Long-term-goals are listed
on my white board: things I want to be sure I don’t forget, but I don’t have to
do today.

Nine – Sprint.  A group of us grabs our first, or next,
cup of coffee and checks in, then we all ignore each other, turn off the
internet and the phone, and work steadily for an hour. It’s a writing club, a
mutual support group, and a fabulous technique for working without
interruption. I write until I meet my word count goal for the day. (Thank
Steven King for this one.)

Eight – Work on one series at a
time. I try my best to immerse myself
in one setting, one set of characters, one story, whether I’m working on a
first draft or revising a draft. Avoiding the “new shiny” keeps me
focused.

Seven – Finish what’s due
first. Except #8 blows up sometimes.
I’ll be in first draft mode on Pony Ring and edits will come in from Beaver
Pond. I operate on the First Due principle. I knock out the edits, because they’re
due in a week or two, then get back to the longer work. The problem with doing
that, of course, is getting back up to speed with the work-in-process, so I can
re-immerse myself in that world.

Six – Take time away from the
desk. By the end of a writing session,
my creative brain is mush. I usually go for what I call my plotting walk,
especially if I’m writing a first draft. There’s something about the rhythm of
walking that brings the next scene or a plot problem into focus. It makes the dogs
happy to get out of the house, too.


Five – Separate creative time
from admin time. I’m
most creative in the early morning, so I do my writing then. A corollary is,
Keep creative time sacred. I don’t schedule anything else for mornings. I try
to keep writing blog posts, scheduling author events, record-keeping, and all
the other business stuff for the evenings.

Four – Work ahead. Know what you want to accomplish – I’ve written
my goals for the year and set up a time table to implement them. That means I
work now on upcoming items instead of
waiting and scrambling at the last minute.

Three – Outsource what I can’t
do. While I tinker with art and
photo-editing, I know my limits with graphic design. I hire a wonderful cover
artist. I like formatting my books, but it’s something I can do in the evening
while my husband watches TV. The key point is identifying what I’m good at and
enjoy, versus what I can outsource. Why waste time on things it would take me
forever to do and rob me of the hours I need to do what I’m good at – writing
stories?

Two – Stay healthy. I always have a full flask of water on my desk.
Fluids in, fluids out. It makes me get up and move around every hour or so. And
if I forget, my Fitbit buzzes at me with a reminder. I try to eat lean fresh
foods, and I get regular exercise even if it isn’t always a sweaty gym workout.
And the exercise doubles as creative time – see #6!

One – Butt in the chair, fingers
on the keyboard. This is
really the most important one. If I get distracted, schedule other things, or
simply don’t do the writing, then…I’m not doing the writing. And that’s my
job. Of all the varied jobs I’ve held, I’m lucky and blessed to have this one I
love.

What tips
can you add?


An award-winning author of financial mysteries, Cathy Perkins writes twisting dark suspense and light amateur sleuth stories.  When not writing, she battles with the beavers over the pond height or heads out on another travel adventure. She lives in Washington with her husband, children, several dogs and the resident deer herd.  Visit her at http://cperkinswrites.com or on Facebook 

Sign up for her new release announcement newsletter in either place.

She’s hard at work on sequel to The Body in the Beaver Pond, which was recently presented with the Claymore Award. 

Regression to the Mean

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by J.M. Phillippe

Two days before Christmas, I had to put my beloved cat Oscar down.

The holidays have been hard for me for a very long time. Grief is like a shadow that is always with you, but changes size and shape depending on what light is around. On the brightest moments of the brightest days, the shadow can shrink down so small you can’t even tell it’s there. Other times, it stretches out so far, it’s the only thing you can see.

The shadows that bother me the most are the ones that come after dark; cast by the light of streetlamps and headlights, they pile up two or three at a time, and are rarely still. There is no true dark where I live in Brooklyn, just as there is no actual silence, just various levels of noise you learn to live with. As such, my nights are filled with shadows.

Christmas lights throw their own particular shadows. The lights are my favorite part of the holiday, and I relish in the opportunity to throw them up on windows, and keep my (fake) tree up as long as possible to help ease the passing of dark-too-long days. I am struggling now with wanting to keep them up even longer, because there is already so much change in my small apartment with my cat gone. I am haunted by the shape of his absence: the lack of warmth against my legs when I sleep, the missing noise of him jumping up or down from things, the many places and things he is not laying on or in. His loss thickens the others that have come before: my grandparents, my brother, and my mother, not to mention other beloved pets. Every time I look for him and he’s not there, I think of the phone calls I can’t make, the people I can no longer hug, and the memories that are fixed and fading.

The passing of a new year is of course something worth celebrating, but it is also something that triggers my grief. Every new turn of the calendar adds to the time after someone I love passed. Every time I count down how long it’s been, I am newly shocked and thrown back into those early days of denial. No, really? It can’t have been that long already… And yet, it is.

Recently I heard someone talk about regression to the mean, a concept in statistics that states that if a variable is extreme on the first measurement, it will be closer to the average on the second (and vice versa). How I understand it from a clinical standpoint is that all things in life — the very big moments either good or bad — eventually return to a sort of baseline. The baseline itself may change over time, but the mean, the average, the day-to-day — we all come back to it eventually.

What I tell my clients is that if you want to see your overall progress toward something, you can’t look at a single data point — a single good day or bad day. You have to look at the trend over time to see if it’s moving in the right direction.

I am not sure what direction I want my life to move in, other than a vague urge to want to have a sense of progress. The loss of a pet is inevitable, if you live long enough, and I knew what I was getting into when I adopted my cat. In fact, I was more aware of the potential of his loss than pretty much any other loss in my life, and that in itself is a gift he gave me. Knowing our days together were naturally numbered, helped me better understand the nature of life and loss.

We love, anyway. And eventually I think I will likely seek out that particular kind of love again, when I’m ready.

In the meantime, what I want most from 2018 is a regression to the mean. It will come — the grief will be less acute, the days will stay lighter longer, and the shadows will feel less omnipresent. I’ll adjust to a new normal, and, as heartbreaking as it sounds, not having him in my life will feel as normal as having him in life did for over a decade.

My one and only New Year’s Resolution is to give myself time. Time to grieve, time to heal, time to write, time to breathe, time to sleep, time to create, time to just be. Next year will come (if I am lucky), and I won’t have to do anything except let the days go by as they are wont to do.

In the meantime, I may keep my tree up until at least the end of January. Some things I’m just not ready to let go of yet.

***

J.M. Phillippe is the author of Perfect Likeness and the short story The Sight. She has lived in the deserts of California, the suburbs of Seattle, and the mad rush of New York City. She works as a clinical social worker in Brooklyn, New York and spends her free time binge-watching quality TV, drinking cider with amazing friends, and learning the art of radical self-love, one day at a time.