Whats the best way to dedicate time to writing a book off-line?
Thoughts, opinions please.
Any time you have ten minutes with no one else in the room.
My dedicated writing time is late at night, after my husband and daughter are in bed. I write until I’m pretty sure I have to go to bed if I’m going to function the next day.
But I also write whenever I find the aforementioned ten minutes. When my daughter is watching Sesame Street. When she has gotten involved in her dollhouse. When my husband takes her on errands. While he is picking her up from school.
There is no “right” time. You just have to make it work.
I wrote a book at Starbucks in the time between when I dropped the kids off at school and the time when I had to show up at work. The most important thing was setting up a routine where starting to write was automatic. It wasn’t something I had to decide to do every day.
For me it is to participate in a critique group of some sort. That way you have deadlines ever two weeks or so, which gives me at least incentive to make time to write.
The feedback is also useful. But there are a lot of other things you can be doing besides writing, and it is easy to put it off without someone else expecting your stuff.
I don’t understand the emphasis on “off-line.” What’s that about?
In my opinion, the best way to write is to have a dedicated time of the day, or week, for that purpose only. Tuesday nights from 10 to midnight, for instance. This gives an artificial self-imposed deadline that is conducive to good writing discipline.
Either that, or have an invigilator standing behind you with a rhinoceros-hide whip with chert flakes sewn into the leather.
Take the time you spend online here (or elsewhere) writing stuff that doesn’t add up to anything.
Use that time to write offline whatever it is you want to write.