I’ve been a full-time writer for a long time. Today’s blog is about how I write, and what I write about. Read on to learn the secrets of my success!
How I Write
The short answer is, I write whenever and wherever I can. The more detailed answer is sitting (whether at my desk, or in bed) in silence, and using a pencil and on paper. The best advice I can give you is to simply start. Whether you write, dictate or type, getting words out of your head and onto a page is the best encouragement I know. Then all you have to do is keep going.
In The Mood?
One thing I never do is wait for the writing muse to arrive. Unless I reserve a block of time each morning to sit down and write, there’s always some distraction calling me away from my desk. If I waited for inspiration to strike, I’d never get anything done!
A trick I use to making starting work easier begins the day before. I stop writing when I’m full of ideas and racing to get them down on paper. Next day, I can’t wait to take up where I left off the night before. During my writing sessions, I use a modified Pomodoro technique–that is, I set a timer for twenty minutes, and write as hard and as fast as I can. I don’t bother about grammar, spelling or punctuation. It’s getting the words down that matters. When the timer goes off, I get up and walk round my desk. After three twenty-minute bursts, I take a longer break to make a cup of tea, visit the greenhouse, water the houseplants, and refill the bird feeders.
This method really helps my productivity.
What to Write
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money” wrote Samuel Johnson, and it’s how I started. I was a freelance, writing non-fiction articles on country living for magazines, and illustrating them with my own photographs.
Getting paid for your writing is the ultimate in validation, but it’s now only one of many reasons why I write. It’s great therapy. Keep a journal, and record your blessings every day as well as your trials. When I was a child, I loved escaping my unhappy life into a world of my own invention. Once I was happily settled with a partner and family, I turned to creating escape routes for others. You can find out more about some of my books here.
Planning or Discovery
I can’t definitively call myself either a planner, or a pantser (discovery writer). If I’m writing a seasonal article or story, its content and deadline has to be planned carefully. The same applies when I’m putting together a series of books, such as Royal Romances (Royal Passion and Royal Risk)
Beyond those boundaries, I’m happy to write by the seat of my pants and become a discovery writer. Sometimes an idea will comes to me and I scribble away spontaneously, discovering how the characters and plot develop as I work.
This is why I find Scrivener so useful. I’ll be blogging on that subject again soon, but you can read one of my original posts about Scrivener here.
Get Comfy
Sitting is supposed to be the new smoking! My writing life is very sedentary. That’s why writing sprints (see In the Mood? above) are so useful. The time spent getting up every twenty minutes and walking about every hour helps prevent Deep Vein Thrombosis. I’ve been considering a walking desk for a while, but I’ve tried writing while standing up and I don’t like it. I much prefer to sit to the task. My current office chair is an Aeron, and it’s amazingly comfortable. It’s like sitting in a hug!
Read, Read, Read
This is probably the most important tip for anyone who wants to become a writer. I’ve loved reading since I was big enough to pick up a book. Before I start a new project, I read as much as I can in the genre in which I’ll be writing. The genre is the style or category, such as Romance, or Crime/Mystery.
Writing for publication is all about satisfying reader expectations. When you read widely you’ll not only learn how it’s done, you’ll discover the tropes that reader love to see included in their favourite books.
Tropes are popular ideas and themes. There are dozens of these, and they provide an easy way for readers to home in on the type of book they’re looking for. Three from the Romance genre are Enemies to Lovers, Forbidden Love, or Secret Baby. Mystery/Crime has Victim as Villain (everybody hated them, so there are multiple suspects), the alcoholic or otherwise troubled detective, and that Agatha Christie regular, Phonecall Foreshadows Death. “I’ve got something important to tell you, M. Poirot. Meet me at seven o’clock…” and when Hercule arrives at the rendezvous, the caller has been murdered!
That’s a quick run-down of how I write. To find out what I’m working on at the moment, see my latest cover reveal, get behind the scenes news, offers and more, sign up for my newsletter here.