Take Baby Steps

Some Spring Color After the Rain

Last year my granddaughter told me she was trying to write a book and asked me for some tips to help her with her writing, I came up with a list of about ten things she could do. Over the next few weeks I’ll share some of my suggestions here.

I’ve read quite a few books on the subject of writing and all of them stress the same thing, if you are serious about being a writer you must write every day whether you want to or not.

This can be very difficult to do as we all have so many other demands on our time, jobs, kids, and in my granddaughter’s case, school work, after-school projects, and homework. And with so little spare time a novel seems a daunting task, so it’s easier not to begin.

But most first-time novelists have the same time constraints as the rest of us, so how did they managed to finish their books? They learn to write in small doses, by getting up an hour earlier, by writing on the train going to work, or in their lunch break. And instead of collapsing in front of the TV after a busy day, they collapsed in front of their computers and wrote some more.

What you need to do is look at your schedule, and decide to commit a certain amount of time to writing. Even if you find that you only have 15 minutes to spare, you can write a couple of paragraphs in that time, and in two days you’ll have a page. Keep it up for a year and you’ll have 183 pages. It doesn’t seem quite so daunting if you look at it like that.

And when you’re standing in line at the cashier’s desk in the supermarket, instead of browsing the magazines, think about what you’re going to write next. (The same applies when doing any menial tasks, housework, driving, or mowing the lawn). That way you’ll know what you want to write before you sit down to write.

This week’s thought for the week:

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." ~ Richard Bach