Two-a-Day Writing Sessions to Speed Up Your Writing

By Scott D. Parker

For those of us with a day job that is not fiction writing, we have to choose to carve out time in our day to write our stories. But there’s never enough time, is there?

Optimizing one’s time becomes crucial in our day-to-day writing experiences. You want to ensure you are making visible progress despite wanting more time to write and not having any.

I’m pretty sure most of us know what a writing sprint is. You set a timer for any length of time and then you go, go, go and write until the timer sounds. Fifteen minutes is cited as a good number, and, depending on how fast you type and how quick your imagination is, you can reach 500 words.

I fell out of the timed-sessions habit mainly because I type fast and my imagination’s on the ball. But I’ve been bumping up against a number of obstacles recently and decided to return to the sprint. With a new wrinkle.

Okay, so it’s not really a wrinkle, but it sounded good in my head so we’ll just go with it, okay?

Two-a-days is a concept usually associated with sports. The athletes practice in the morning, wait hours and then practice a second time in the afternoons. It’s designed to give the body rest and, when it’s time to practice, you give it all.

This past week, I’ve been doing two-a-day writing sessions. In the weekday mornings, I know I can get at least fifteen minutes of writing done before I have to stop and get ready for and commute to work. In nearly every instance, I am not finished with a scene, but the timer’s beeping and the clock on the wall’s telling me I have to get ready for work.

So I close the laptop and do that.

Then, later on at my lunch hour, I open the laptop up again and do another fifteen minutes, picking up right where I left off.

But here’s the actual wrinkle to this process: even at my lunch time, when I have an uninterrupted hour to write, I still do the fifteen-minute bursts. When that timer sounds, I stop typing, stand up, and walk the conference room. I look out the window and soothe the mind. Sure, I might mull over the next line but for the most part, I don’t. That’s the rest time, usually a three-minute span. What that three-minute timer goes off, I sit back down, reset the phone for fifteen minutes, and go.

With this concentrated focus time of three writing sessions in a lunch hour, I can get 1,000-1,400 knocked out in an hour. For my work-from-home day, I do this process in the morning before my work day.

The progress I made this week was eye opening, so I think I’ll keep on this “workout” until this book is done. Our imagination is a muscle, so give it a good workout twice a day and see how far your book will go.

 

Exercise

Yes, the post is late today. Blame a slightly dodgy internet connection. But better late than never, right?
By Russel D McLean

Some days the words won’t come.

Some days all you want to do is turn off the machine and walk away. Or put down the pen.

Whatever, the way you write is your choice.

Some people call that urge to walk, “writers block”.

I say there’s no such thing. Not really. But the mind is, if you’ll forgive a mild cliché*, a muscle. And like any muscle, sometimes it gets tired or fatigued. Often through overuse. Sometimes through just doing the same thing over and over again.

It happens to us all.

Someone asked me what I do when I feel I can’t get going on a fiction project. “What is your one tip to get moving again?”

It was one my dad gave me, actually. I think he might have read it in an old Writer’s Digest, back in the days when J Michael Straczynski was chronicling the development of some wee TV show called Babylon 5 he was touting to studios and Nancy Kress was writing some of the most common-sense and downright useful columns on writing fiction I ever read.

Maybe it was one of them who had the idea. Maybe it was someone else.

Anyway, the advice was this:

Go switch on the TV.

Really. Go switch it on. Any channel will do.

Write down the first line of dialogue you hear.

Turn off the TV.

Go back to the desk. That dialogue is your starting point. Take it from there. With your own characters. Your own people.

Write the scene that flows from that dialogue.

Why does this exercise work? I think because it gets your brain warmed up again. Allows it to take a new and refreshing tack. Stops it from cramping up.

I rarely use the scene that I wind up with. Most of the time I abandon it halfway through because, out of the back of my head, comes the solution for the other work that I’ve been searching for. Maybe it’s as simple as a distraction technique. That whole thing where if you focus on something else then the answer to your first problem simply presents itself.
Or maybe it’s like I said, sometimes you need to warm up your mind same as any other muscle.

Whatever the case, that’s what does it for me. And you never know, it could be of some help to you, too.

*of course, every so often, only a cliché will do. But please use them sparingly. Or you’ll wind up like me…