Wednesday, April 16, 2008

When Life Gets in the Way

One of the odd things about my annual schedule is that I have blocks of time that completely interrupt writing due to holidays or massive overload at work, and times that are really smooth and when writing should be relatively straightforward. I'm beginning to find that having my writing broken up for long periods of time, quite regularly, makes it much more difficult to get back into a rhythm when those "free time" blocks roll around--like having to build up momentum all over again.

Anyway, I thought I'd throw the questions out to you all: What things get in the way of writing for you? Do you have good times of year and bad times of year for writing? And what have you found to be helpful to get yourself writing again?

7 comments:

Michael Damian Thomas said...

Being the caregiver to a medically fragile child means that all it takes is an illness to throw off my writing. When my daughter is sick, I have to give her my full attention. She just had a stomach virus that took ten days. I didn’t write a word during that.

Anonymous said...

Life pretty much gets in the way of my writing. Simply day-to-day life and responsibilities. As a result, weekends are when I get the bulk of my writing done. To get into it I usually do some pre-writing like make a blog post or two just to warm up. Then I might transcribe some notes I made earlier in the week about my story. After that I will read what I had written last. By that time, and with copious amounts of iced tea in me, I'm usually ready to write. A typical session is 1000+ words, though I have managed 5000 words in one sitting a couple of times.

Anonymous said...

It depends on what's going on with Thomas' health as to what's going on with my writing. F'ex, he's been in the hospital now for two weeks - so I've not written one lick. Even so, I was able to take the chunk out of the organizational bit of the beginning of a new project - so that's all well and good. (ftr, Thomas should get to go home Monday. YAY)

Michael Damian Thomas said...

Hooray!

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear that, Mari, but it's good to hear that he'll be headed home. Hope he gets well and stays that way!

Bill Henry said...

The return of sunlight to the world helps the cause immeasurably.

Or, in fact, helps it *measurably*, because page count goes up.

Anonymous said...

I work in retail management which is hardly conducive to a regular writing schedule. Some days I don't get home until after midnight, only to get back up at 5am to go back. And writing from Thanksgiving to after Christmas is virtually impossible.

I have, however, learned to survive on four hours of sleep per night.