Connecting With Your Story

I mentioned in my, “Shower Before You Write” post, that to be thinking of your story before you even sit down to start writing can be an enormous help when it comes to using your allotted writing time effectively. Well there’s one more thing you can do to help keep your story fresh in your mind so that you can start writing as soon as you open that document. Record what you accomplished in your writing that day in a journal.

It’s surprising what this will do for your attachment to your story. I’ve started to refer to my characters as actual people. They feel real to me because not only do I think about them while showering, eating, driving, and while writing their stories out, but they’re also the main topic when I’m writing in my journal. Writing can easily become a lifestyle when you approach your writing regimen in this manner, with surprisingly little time invested into it. You don’t have to be writing 3 hours a day to consider yourself a writer. I’ve done the 8 hour a day writing regimen when I was younger and still felt like I was lacking some connection other writers seemed to have with their work. It’s more of a mindset that you need to get yourself into. When you think of your story so often in a day, you start to dream and daydream in that realm, you start to feel like you’re a writer because you’re always there with your characters. And your readers can see the care you put into your story when that happens.

If you don’t keep a journal, keep a blog. Talk about the things you’re writing about. Don’t give any plot twists or overall story of your book away. You want to be kind of vague if you’re posting it online so your story doesn’t get stolen and published before you get around to it, but you can still talk about characters without any worry of that. Once you’re writing about your story even when you’re not writing in your story, then you’ll have no problem with jumping back into writing. Once you start to do this, you can say goodbye to writers block forever.