Labels: writing

I Wrote My Novel Fifteen Minutes at a Time

I created The Blue Room Cafe by writing 15 minutes in the morning everyday for about two months. At first it was weird writing for such a short time. It's like once I got started, it was time to stop. However, the more I did it, the more I saw that if you work on something just a little bit everyday, you make way more progress than if you just work on it for a few hours once a week.

Also, writing everyday kept me in touch with my story and helped me to power through the tough parts. Some days I didn't feel like facing the blank page, but then I would think, "Well, I'm only going to work on it for 15 minutes.  If it takes me 15 minutes to think of two sentences to write, that's okay. After I'm done I can still go do other stuff."

Of course even when writing was challenging I was able to write more than two sentences in 15 minutes, but giving myself small increments of time to work made the task of writing seem much smaller. I didn't feel like I was taking on the entire project all at once.

Most of time I felt motivated to write because once the 15 minutes were up, my ideas were still flowing freely, and I would always stop writing mid-sentence. By stopping mid-sentence, I knew that I wouldn't be able to rest until I finished that sentence the next day which would be the start of another 15 minute session.

So 15 minutes at a time I wrote until I finished my rough draft. Now I'm on to editing.

Do you have a set schedule for writing everyday?