Season 2, Episode 29: Habits – Hard to Make, Easy to Break
IN THIS EPISODE
In a recent Author Accelerator Coffee Talk - Have you ever read a book where something feels familiar because you lived a similar situation? One of the participants, a middle school librarian, says "Oh. I LIVE stories!" Abby liked it so much she put it on a t shirt. You can find it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PSVBG61
We talk habits today, and how we can better incorporate writing into our lives as habit, and finding and making the time to write. We want to make it as much of a habit as checking your email or brushing your teeth. Since moving to Florida and adjusting to a new school start time, Abby's struggled to find writing time now that her creative morning hour has been co-opted by all the before-school prep for the kids. Everyone has their preferred writing time, the time they're most productive - find yours. For the time being, Abby had to adjust her habits around the new school schedule and a new job. There are probably few among us, especially parents, who can keep a consistent writing time from year to year.
Mel's a nighttime writer - it's when she gets the most done. For a variety of reasons (sleep among them) it's not working as well anymore. She's going to introduce a walk after work to give her brain a break before sitting down again to write. She says that she needs to be more disciplined about her writing time - not the making time for it, but not being too precious about the time of day it falls into. Sometimes, you have to take what you can get.
Abby's plan is a little different - she's keeping her early morning writing time, but she's cutting out the things that waste her time after she wakes up. 1) no responding to email, no responding to texts until she gets her writing time in. No one is waiting for Abby's response to their email at 5:30 in the morning! 2) Taking on an alter ego - a writer's alter ego. Abby's husband Sean is the human version of Cliff Notes, and he related this story to her that he'd read about a football player that took on certain aspects, certain alter egos of successful football players before he went onto the field. Abby's alter ego is... Ernestina Potter! (A totally made up personality, BTW.) What was her deal? How did she write? Was there anything she had that was unique to her, that Abby could use to put on her "writer's hat" when it's time to get down to business?
Kemlo and Mel talk psychopaths and sociopaths, and whether or not it's important to add in certain details about her protagonist. If her character gets hired to do a certain job in the story, and the story moves so fast she doesn't actually get a chance to do it...does she need to include it? What's the risk of leaving it in, and the workload involved in taking it out? The MomWrites team spools out the possibilities and give Mel a plethora of options to choose from.
If you've dropped the thread on something--a character development, a plot point, etc--how do you pick it back up again? Mel goes back to the very beginning and finds spots throughout the book that are the perfect places to add these in. A word, a few lines, a paragraph or two - it's different for every situation. According to Kemlo, if you've got something you want to add that spans over several scenes it would be good to add it into your outline first, so that you can see potential issues before you put in the work.
