Shower Before You Write

Alright, so you’ve got started on your daily writing routine. Awesome, that’s the first step into accomplishing your writing goals. But following the regimen is only the first step to making effective use of your 30 minutes of daily writing. Ready for the next step?

For me, when I first started a 30 minute daily writing schedule, I sat down at the computer, opened my document, started reading a few paragraphs of what I had written the day before, sat back and thought about what should come next and how to say it, and then started writing. By this time, 15 minutes of my precious writing time had already ticked away. I learned that I couldn’t just start up cold like that. I couldn’t sit down and expect to start writing where I had left off the day before; so, I came up with a solution to that.

One day the only time I had in the day to write was in the morning, so I got up earlier than usual. I planned to write directly after my shower. An amazing thing happened. In the shower, the only topic on my mind was my story. I reviewed the plot, where my story was going and where I should guide my characters that day, what they would say, what they would do.  When I loaded up my story on the computer, I was typing straight off the bat. Soon as that happened, I made sure to shower before every time I wrote. It didn’t have to be showering though, I realized that after a bit. It was just the fact that while in the shower, I had no other pressing thoughts so I had time to think about my book. I started to do the same for other mundane activities and pretty soon, I was writing after meals, drives, or any other menial tasks where I could consider what I was going to write in my book that day.

Now my 30 minutes of writing is 30 minutes of writing—not 15 to get warmed up and the other 15 for writing. It’s a little thing, to simply be thinking of your story before sitting down at the keyboard, but it’s saved me countless hours of staring at a blank screen.