Prioritize

When you decide to quit your day job and write full time, you’ll have to give careful consideration to your priorities. No longer will someone else be deciding what work you have to do and when you have off. Now it will be your responsibility. For some writers, this works great. For others, it doesn’t.

The first thing you’ll need to do is figure out when your peak thinking and writing times occur. Are you a “first-thing-in-the-morning” person, a midday person, or an evening person? Also, do your peak thinking times and peak writing times occur at the same time or at different times during the day? If yours are separate, you’ll want to focus more on the former, giving it top priority in your daily schedule. It’s harder to think out a piece of writing than it is to actually write it.

To help you set your priorities, you must first create a daily work schedule. You don’t have to stick tightly to it, but it should act as a guide. To begin, block out a schedule for the week, indicating when you’ll begin work. You may want to use the same schedule you used in your former job. Working from nine to five is good for a start. Next block out time for lunch, 30-60 minutes should do.

Now that you have your start and end times, plus lunch scheduled, you can lay in blocks of time for your work. If you know when you’re at your peak for thinking, block in time at the appropriate hour. Then lay in some time for writing and research. It helps to mix up your day by working on several projects in different stages. While you’re getting ideas for one, you may be working on the first draft of another, and starting research for a third. Doing this actually helps exercise your brain and prevents getting burned out by writing for hours on end. It pays in the long run to not write for more than two hours at a time.

And don’t forget to allow time to get more work. You’ll need to send out E-mail messages to editors, or perhaps call them on the phone. And when will you study new publications to see if you’re right for them? Many editors schedule staff meetings on Monday and often Fridays are wrap-up times before publication, so you’ll want to limit your editorial contacts to the middle of the week.

What many people who work for themselves forget is allowing time for other obligations. Do you have to take or pick your kids up from school? When do you do grocery shopping? Must you cook meals for your family? What about talking to friends on the phone?

It’s a real temptation to procrastinate when you work at home. You may say to yourself, “I’ll do that later,” but do you? If you have a tendency to procrastinate, you need to attack the problem head-on. Doing so will increase your production and your income immediately.

You should try to schedule time to write every day. Some days you may have more time while on others less, but writing every day will help you keep up the momentum. Be sure to divide your time adequately among important projects. If you know you have deadline coming up, be flexible enough to allow time to finish the project that’s due. This means you must be careful that deadlines don’t pile up on one another. And for some writers, having no deadline takes away the impetus to get things done.

To help you prioritize your work, create three lists—one for Top Priority items, one for Secondary, and one for Do at Leisure Tasks for each week? This will help you stay on track. You might plan on taking care of the items on the first two lists during “working” hours and leave smaller tasks, like filing, correspondence, and organizing notes for evenings or Saturdays.

And while it’s important to get your current work finished, it’s just a important to plan ahead for new work. Do you have days or evenings when you are systematically building your files, increasing your contacts, beginning speculative new ventures, adding to your catalog of possible topics, and promoting yourself?  How about the time it takes to read and answer your E-mail and check on your social media sites?

If you keep your priorities in order as you start out in your writing career, you’ll be in a better position to recognize and take advantage of golden opportunities as they arise. The more you priorities your work, the easier it will be to tackle really complex projects and do them without stress. And as your career progresses, you should have more and more work to do. There are only so many hours in a day, and you can’t squeeze more work out of them than you already are unless you set your priorities.

Plan diversions into your work schedule. Don’t be a workaholic. But do so with care. It's too easy to take time to have that extra cup of coffee.

Creative Thinking Comes Before Creative Writing

Many writers don’t think before they write—at least not creatively. Because of this, they get mired in the mess of words that sometimes pours out of their heads without any idea of where they’re going with them.

Part of the reason for this goes back to school. While some teachers encourage creative thinking, most don’t. They’re under pressure to cover all the material in the curriculum for their course in a specified time, and in many cases that doesn’t leave room to get creative.

A young, enthusiastic English teacher, who also was an actor in her off hours, got very creative in teaching Shakespeare. The head of the English department admonished her for doing so and not sticking to the curriculum for her course. Needless to say, the teacher took it until the end of the year, then she quit. Her students really got into Shakespeare, but according to the old biddy who headed up the department, that wasn’t the way to do it.

Many beginning writers believe if they just sit in front of their computer that the right words will pour out. They think this way because in school they often had to write in class with little time to properly think out what they were doing. While this type of spontaneous writing may work part of the time, usually when it does, it’s a “happy accident”—a fine creation that usually can’t be duplicated because the writer doesn’t know how they did it in the first place. The trick is to figure out how to creatively solve a writing problem, so the procedure can be repeated. Stephen King has authored lots of books. Once he figured out how to make his first one a success, all he had to do was creatively think of other plots that he could use. By making them twist and turn, he came up with a mass of work.

When beginning a writing project, it’s important to sit and think about it from several different angles. Look at all the possibilities. Mull it over. One of those possibilities might be out in left field, but it just may turn out to be the best solution. Jot down every alternative that seems like it might work.

As a freelance writer, you need to also think creatively at every opportunity, not just to write creatively but to operate your business that way. Once you start thinking creatively, you’ll find that it eventually becomes second nature. Life, itself, is a puzzle, but freelance writing is an even bigger one.

With brighter, more creative ideas than your competition, you can move forward quickly in freelancing. Never accept what looks like a closed door. Move in closer and give it a shove. You may discover it was simply an optical illusion.

Total Immersion

I began my writing career over 25 years ago writing short articles for local newspapers. At the time, I thought spending a week working on a 1,000-word-or-so article was a long time.

Over the years, I continued to write articles, eventually graduating to longer more complicated magazine pieces. Churning these out one after another became the norm. Each required some research and writing skill, but not as much as goes into writing a book.

Though I began writing shorter books early on—my first was one on solar energy that was 20 years ahead of its time—none of these projects demanded as much of me as the book projects I’m working on now.

My total immersion into book writing began in 2005. For about a year before that I knew deep down inside that it was time for me to move on to longer works, and as the Honda commercials so aptly put it, “Mr. Opportunity came a knockin’.” Then, instead of working on a project for a few days, I began working on ones that took 10-12 weeks or more.

This level of intense concentration on one subject was at first daunting. But after finishing my first 100,000-word+ manuscript–it actually was 130,000 words—my mind became used to the routine of 16-hour work days.

Working on a book necessitates that my mind be constantly working. While I’m writing one chapter, I’m researching the next, thinking about another, and editing the last. It’s not until about a fourth of the way into the writing of a book that the book’s concept begins to gel. It’s then that I begin to visualize the entire book as a unit.

So many beginning writers want to write books—I suppose for all the “glamour” and credibility that they perceive comes with them. But what they don’t realize is that no only are their writing skills not fully developed but neither are their thinking skills. And it’s because of the latter that 99 percent of the books started never get finished.

So before you set out to tackle those big projects, start out slowly with smaller ones. Sharpen your writing and your thinking skills and soon you’ll be on your way to writing success.