Right Ways to Write?
Many years ago, I heard a bit of advice somewhere about trying to write a book. If you do nothing else, the advice went, do these two things: establish a routine, write every day.
Back in the early aughts, when I wrote my first two novels (neither published), I lived that routine. Every morning, I would get up about 6, exercise, shower, have a simple breakfast, and then walk into my computer room, sit down at the desktop and write for 20 to 30 minutes.
For me, writing has always come in bursts. In that short timeframe, I could bat out several pages by inhabiting the characters I created. I heard their conversations, visualized the scene. The speed with which I write is a blessing, something I was gifted with from the time I learned to type in sixth grade right on through my years as a journalist, whether I was writing or editing.
Life changes, though.
When the creative writing bug struck again in the fall of 2021, things were different. I am now married, and at that time had a dog and a cat intent on being fed at 6 a.m. daily and a job I liked to be at by 7:15. Why would a clinical mental health counselor need to be at work so early, you might ask? And what does any of this have to do with writing fiction and a “routine?”
Well, my first client of the day is typically at 8 or 9 a.m. But I like to be in the office early to prepare for my day, read past reports about sessions with clients, and be in the head space I need for my job. The result is I get up 5:15 to 5:30 daily and have little to no time for writing in the early morning. My old computer room, meanwhile, has become my wife’s office, as she works from home. And I’ve long since given up a desktop for a MacBook Pro, which offers flexibility.
Life, too, offers, or more accurately, requires flexibility, as I’ve learned the past couple of years.
To write Unwrapping (which now appears likely to be delayed until early 2024 publication), I found myself pursuing alternative ways to get into character. My favorite place to write today is at the “bistro table” in our remodeled kitchen, often while my wife, Terrie, is putting together a meal. Sometimes, as Terrie is writing a post for her food blog (www.comfortdujour.com and yes, you should definitely sign up for it!) after dinner, I’ll open my laptop and create stereo MacBook tapping in the living room.
Often, though, another unusual thing happens that is conducive to the kind of fiction I’m writing now. A clinical mental health counselor’s schedule not only varies every day, but is subject to last-minute cancellations. There are pockets when I wind up having time between clients.
Every day when I arrive, I place my MacBook on the left side of my big old-school office desk, a counterbalance to my work HP desktop on the right side and a extra screen in the middle. I have often found the ability to write there because my current characters, though very different from the clients I see, are going through the same family of behavioral health issues: anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, loneliness, dysfunctional coping mechanisms.
This is, after all, the place where I do critical thinking about my clients and the ways I can work with them. Why wouldn’t it do the same for my fictional characters?
Thus, in this second period of fiction writing in my life, I have largely abandoned the old advice. I do not write every day. Nor do I have a set routine. I have writing “chaos.” Yet pages keep getting written; Unwrapping came together in about nine months, and I expect to finish my second book, begun in March, by year’s end.
In the end, I would adjust that advice I heard so many years ago and offer aspiring writers some “writer/counselor” thoughts: Find a way to write that works for you, be open to change and be forgiving of yourself if you have a bad day or struggle. If it is meant to be, it will happen.
Lastly, I’ll share something I often tell me clients because it applies to writing, too: Everything that happens in a therapist’s office is an experiment. And experiments can go awry. A first draft of anything (and often second, third and fourth drafts) is an experiment. Be prepared to edit.