Pam here …

How’s your 2020 writing year going? Have you started on a new project or are you moving forward with a new one? Or are you in between projects? Or completely stalled?

After a shaky start to the year with the fires impacting my family it’s taken me until half-way through February to get organised. Well, almost organised. Anyone how knows me will tell you I’m NOT an organised person, in writing or life. But I’m employing a few tactics to try and change my ways. Having indie published Cross My Heart last September I need to get my current manuscript completed. I also want to spend more time on Writes4Women, attend conferences and author talks, and do more workshops and mentoring. Along with family life and animal wrangling that’s a whole lot of hours, and it’s only going to happen if I’m committed and organised.

Recently I listened to a couple of audiobooks which have helped get me motivated and given me some ideas on how to improve my productivity. The first was Productivity for Authors by Joanna Penn, followed by Business for Authors by the same author. You may know Joanna from the podcasting world – The Creative Penn podcast is one both Kel and I listen to and Joanna has plenty of tips about self-publishing and making an income from your writing. My main takeaways from these two books are:

· Schedule your time

· Prioritise

· Do it anyway

1) Scheduling - I’ve flirted with scheduling for years now. My old diaries are full of pencilled lists, calendar details and notes. They’re also full of huge gaps where I’ve completely ignored the whole concept of writing a to-do list, but 2020 is the year of the schedule. For the last couple of weeks I’ve been making daily to-do lists, ticking each item off when it’s done and moving anything not done onto the next day or week. The trick is checking the diary each day, or multiple times, and recording everything you need to do. At the moment it seems to be working. There are lots of ticks in there and I’m achieving more in my day than before I started which is motivating me to keep going.

2) Prioritising - Part of the trick with the list making is to put the most urgent things or the things that HAVE to be done at the top and work your way down. For a writer, getting the words on the page should always be at the top of the list. I have to admit I’m still working on this, using other tasks as procrastination tools and rationalising this by telling myself these things are just as important. I’m still spending time each day on my writing but it does need to be moved up the list which is where number 3 comes in…

3) Just do it – As in, just write. One of the things that’s been stopping me writing is, correction THE thing stopping me writing, is fear. No surprise there. All writing blocks come back to this one emotion. Currently, for me, the fear is I won’t be able to realise the vision for the story in my head. I’m coming up with all kinds of excuses not to just sit down and write: I don’t know enough about the characters, the plot is flimsy, I need to research more, I need a solid block of time … and the list goes on. Even though I know these gremlins for what they are I’m still not at the point where I can just sit down and put the words on the page, but I’m getting there. And I’ve been using a couple of awesome writing tools to help get me moving in the right direction.

The One Stop For Writers Character builder is a fantastic tool that allows you to build up your understanding of your characters by accessing the site’s collection of reference materials. This site is the online library for the Emotion Thesaurus and other wonderful writing helpers. The Character Builder allows you to come up with an extremely detailed profile, develop your character arc and connect it to your plot outline all in the one place. You can even download a PDF copy of the document and then upload it into Scrivener. While working on my main character’s profile did begin as another way of avoiding the writing, it also triggered additional story ideas and got me to the point where I could write a couple of new scenes and start making progress.

The second thing that’s helped me enormously is uploading the 20K words I have so far into Scrivener. I’ve used Scrivener to write my last two novels and even though I only used a small portion of the gadgets it was a great way to develop the story and organise my ideas. I’ve recently set up a new laptop and downloaded Scrivener 3 so I took the time to do a couple of video tutorials and I’m wrapped in the possibilities. I’ve set up the corkboard, not only with the scenes I’ve already written, but with labels for a whole lot of new scenes. I’ve even colour coded them to indicate point of view, uploaded images of my characters into the research section and made notes on plot and theme in another folder in the Binder. Thinking of the story in terms of a collection of scenes that can be re-arranged and added to at a later date is helping me overcome my fear of not having a strong enough plot. Once the scenes are there I will be able to go back and strengthen them, change the order to start building a plot and seeing where the gaps are so I can add more to the narrative. If you don’t have Scrivener these are all things you can do either using a notebook or index cards.

Setting out scenes on the corkboard in Scrivener is helping me get organised.

A couple of other things have helped with my new, organised, mindset. One was listening to Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. This book, recommended by Joanna Penn, is all about having a professional mindset. It’s about sitting your butt in the chair day in, day out, and treating your writing as a job not a hobby. Writing has been part of my income for the last seven years but I’ve allowed myself to be easily distracted, drawn away from my desk too often and have not always treated it as seriously as I should have. Pressfield reminded me that if I want to be in this profession for the long haul (and I do) I need to be deadly serious about it. To that end, I need to schedule, prioritise and just do it!

At the end of last year I listened to The Resilience Project by Hugh van Cuylenburg. It’s about his experience motivating others to be more resilient through gratitude and positive thinking. One of the tools of the project is a daily journal with guided questions. The journal also allows you to record your exercise, diet, sleep and mindfulness achievements each day. While I’ve missed a few days here and there, I have found that completing the journal and recording my stats each day has helped me keep on track in all these different areas. Having a positive, pro-active approach to my habits and health is helping me be more organised with my writing and work commitments. It’s amazing how much momentum I’ve been able to build up just by writing down what I’m achieving.

With February now half over it’s time for me to stop organising and start doing. It’s time to get words down on the page again, build up my word count and get the draft manuscript done. To reach my goal of having 90,000 words by the end of March I’m going to need to do 10,000 words a week for the next 7 weeks. It’s a big call, but no different to doing Nano so I’m going for it. I’ll record my word counts each day just as I’m recording my sleep, exercise and diet habits and see how it goes. One of Joanna Penn’s recommendations is to have notes on your corkboard, whiteboard or on our laptop reminding you to get your words down each day. I’m printing off the image at the top of this page and putting it on the front of my laptop.

Wish me luck, and if you have any organisational tips please share them with us in the comments.

Happy writing.

Pam x

Getting Organised