5 Tips to Getting Back to Writing

Okay, the summer is over if you count Labor Day as the Official End of The Vacation Season. It is now time to go back to the keyboard or pick up the writing tools and start working again. I am certain a huge sigh follows reading that line. I sighed heavily after writing it. Since Labor Day was always the holiday that signaled the start of the school season back when I was still in school, that is how I still view it. That means all those excuses for not writing on my manuscript must end. Time to edit, to write, to WORK!

 But how can we do that?  How can we get started again? I actually used to enjoy the beginning of the school year and the new school supplies and new clothes. I also liked the idea that I would be taking classes I hadn’t taken before and that I would be learning new things.

Let’s look at a few ideas for putting our now much older brain cells back into the writing harness.

1. Go back to your last manuscript. Open up that manuscript you were working on –whether that was a month ago or two months ago.  Start reading it, start editing it, but get busy with it. But don’t start from where you left off. Start from the very beginning. Re-read your work and see if it holds up from the beginning.

          2. Re-introduce yourself to your characters. See if you are introducing them properly. You probably know them a little better after spending that time with them earlier. Look over whether you really got some of who they are into those opening paragraphs.

         3. Check over your setting. Are you pulling readers into the setting at the beginning and making them feel the location, the time period or the time of year? Look for places you can edit or make notes on items you need to look up. 

      4. Focus on the Inciting Incident. Are you getting the start of the story in quickly enough or are you spending too many pages setting everything up? Those days of long involved openings no longer work. Readers want to get into the meat of the story as quickly as possible.

       5. Make necessary edits but don't bog down. While you want to fix the big problems, don’t get so engrossed with making it perfect that you forget to move on. The story needs to continue to move and you need to continue to write it and get the rest of the story out of your head.  

Mainly you want to start working with fresh ideas, a fresh outlook and fresh determination to finish. Set up some new writing rules for the rest of the year or set them up as though you were starting the next year of school. Try some new writing trick or lesson that you heard about over the summer. Maybe it’s time to try using a timer and attempting writing sprints. Or try using a new writing program. It’s a new year, why not try something new?

The long days of winter are ahead and there will be plenty of days where it makes sense not to go out, but to stay inside and WRITE!