Wednesday, March 28, 2018

I've Realized My Writing Process is Weird


Most of you know that I'm a mother of eight children. In order to carve out time for writing with a lot of kids, I usually had to think through my scenes while I was changing diapers and washing dishes, then, when Barney or Paw Patrol came on, I would rush to the computer and write down everything I'd been thinking about. I had half-hour increments to get any writing done and it worked for a lot of years.

Fast forward to this year, when my youngest is in school all day and I have HOURS to write. I could write for six hours a day if I wanted to! I had big plans for this year and was going to be so super productive.

But, I've realized over the last two months when I was under some hard deadlines, that my writing process is super weird. I'll be sitting at my computer, typing away, but after half an hour, my brain just has to get up and go do some housework or something. I tried to work through it, but my brain has just been trained to stop working after half an hour!

My workaround is that I go ahead and take a break to do some household chores, put in laundry, sweep the floor, or whatever, and then go back to writing. Oddly, my brain just picks back up and I go on my merry writing way! And the upside of it is, I'm getting a lot of writing done AND my house is looking great!

I wonder if time goes on, that my brain will eventually be able to adjust and just write for longer than half an hour. I hope so! But until then, I'll just keep trying to balance this strange process.

Do you believe brains are trained in certain habits?

1 comment:

Alyson said...

Hahaha. They absolutely are!