Many writers have huge to-do lists along with families, jobs, household duties, and social obligations. Sometimes, life doesn’t allow us to get in our writing time.
We get depressed.
We snap at people.
We are suffering from writing withdrawals.
Our creative horses are chomping at the bit, but we’re stuck doing some mundane task that feels like it’s sucking the life from us.
During these days when it seems like the world has conspired against your creative goals, give yourself a quick fix.
Write a poem.
Don’t overthink it. Freestyle on the page and see what happens.
Poems don’t need to have a beginning, middle, or ending. They can be impressions, abstractions, or silly word play.
I promise you’ll get a tiny jolt of gratification, or at least a bit of relief from writing withdrawals.
How do you feel when you’re kept away from your writing?
I’m going to begin sharing some excerpts of the most astonishing writing I’ve ever come across.
There are writers who entertain, and there are writers who drill to the core of the human heart.
Leo Tolstoy is one of these legends that inspire me to go beyond storytelling to create something deeper.
This passage is from Anna Karenina just after she and Count Vronsky commit adultery.
He felt what a murderer must feel, when he sees the body he has robbed of life. That body, robbed by him of life, was their love, the first stage of their love. There was something awful and revolting in the memory of what had been bought at this fearful price of shame. Shame at their spiritual nakedness crushed her and infected him. But in spite of all the murderer’s horror before the body of his victim, he must hack it to pieces, hide the body, must use what he has gained by his murder.
And with fury, as it were with passion, the murderer falls on the body, and drags it and hacks at it; so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand, and did not stir. “Yes, these kisses–that is what has been bought by this shame. Yes, and one hand, which will always be mine–the hand of my accomplice.” She lifted up that hand and kissed it. He sank on his knees and tried to see her face; but she hid it, and said nothing. At last, as though making an effort over herself, she got up and pushed him away. Her face was still as beautiful, but it was only the more pitiful for that.
“All is over,” she said; “I have nothing but you. Remember that.”
When you sit down to write, do you ever have thoughts like:
One day I’ll write my best story. This is just practice.
It’s not like anyone’s going to read this.
It will never get published anyway.
Of course you’re not going to write well if you have this mindset. This habit of thinking lets you off the hook. You don’t have to put yourself on the line and give it your all if you tell yourself that this isn’t going to be The Story that changes your life.
Write like it matters.
Imagine that your work-in-progress is the one that will launch your writing career. Think about agents and publishers looking at it. Allow yourself the possibility that they will be mesmerized. Visualize your readers’ faces as they turn the pages. How do you want them to feel?
I just read a blog post by one writer whose toddler destroyed his computer. His life’s work was completely lost. Then one of my writing friends recently told me she lost a new story she was working on. It disappeared somewhere into a digital vortex of Office Online.
I keep a file of drafts that I save for future blog posts and short stories. Sometimes I don’t decide to work on them for years. I’ve gone back to look for them to discover they’ve disappeared at some point. By that time it’s too late to troubleshoot what happened. All the clues are long gone.
We know we should save copies of our writing in multiple places. We just get complacent and lazy.
We don’t think a major loss will happen to us. We figure we’ll wait till we get to the final draft before we start backing up.
But it’s not like the olden days when all writers had a hard copy on paper. Our digital words are intangible and vulnerable to the slightest glitch or failure.
It only takes a few minutes to make sure you never lose any of your writing.
Tips for Backing Up Your Writing:
Have your computer synced to a cloud storage service. Instead of using the browser version, download the desktop app so that copies of your writing files are saved simultaneously to your hard drive and the cloud. I use Dropbox, which keeps updated copies of my work on all of my hardware. If one goes down, it will be on one of my other devices as well as online.
Email copies of your manuscript to yourself and leave them in your inbox.
Save drafts to an external drive.
Save often as you write or set your word processor to auto-save.
The best tip for backing up your writing is:
set up your system now.
Don’t wait till you lose your precious words to take action.
