Tips & Tricks #4: Know When to Quit

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I'm not the sort of person who can pull off a Herculean all-nighter on the last day. Yes, I'm a procrastinator. Yes, I'm a rationalizer. But I'm also aware of the value of sitting down and getting it done.

Here's the value: getting to do something else.

My daily goal is 2,000 words. Most days, I beat that goal by a hundred or so words. If I meet this goal on a daily basis, I will easily make my 50,000 words in 30 days. In fact, I'll make it in 25 days. Lucky me.

But in the meantime, there's laundry to do. Children do feed. Winter in the mountains also involves lots of additional chores like bringing up wood, covering plants, finding lost mittens. The point is that while I think it's important to sit down every day and not get up until my 2,000 words are done, I think that it's equally important to GET UP after they're done.

I think a lot of people sit down for 12 hours a day for the first few days, write 10,000 words, which is a great thing, but are so overwhelmed by how much it takes out of them that they can't see going on. And I can't say that I blame them. I don't have 12 hours a day for a month to do anything. Modern life just doesn't work like that.

The only way I've been able to consistently do my thing and finish is by working the day I have set before myself, and then giving myself permission to stop. Lay down the pen, shut off the laptop, step away from the blackboard.

The plus side is that when I go back to it, I have had off time to chew over ideas and figure out where my characters are and where they should be. That off time for thinking things through is valuable to me, and without it, I think that my process would take me much longer as I tried to muddle my characters through poorly conceived situations on the fly, only to have to write them back out of it again.

Hang out. Sleep. Read a magazine. Eat a meal while holding a glass of water in the other hand. Do things that don't involve writing for a little bit.

And then go back to it.