From Cold to Hot! Hot! Hot! Procrastinate? Who me?

If, like me, you sit down to write but procrastinate… Hang on a mo… kettle just popped. Right, where was I, yes, if like me you like to procrastinate and find lots of excuses to do anything but write, did I offer you a Digestive? (In the kitchen, will only take a second, unless the cat needs fed, out, or to dictate that all humans are her serfs and give her due diligence paid in mice.)

Bugger! Procrastination can creep up on you like a wall of the brown stuff and stop you from getting anything on paper, if you excuse the expression.

So, here are my top tips to get something out.... and no, not the biscuit packet.

Write! Write more and keep on writing!

Something scribbled on the back of a napkin, or an envelope can go from a few shitty words to a sentence, a life one if you write crime, or get exceptionally frustrated. Anyway, as in the search for a stray biscuit, something is inevitably better than nothing. Get it down!

Plan

Give yourself a time period where you know that the kids are out, the cat’s asleep and the other half has complete use of the remote control. This should allow you a window, even if it’s only a small window, to scribble in peace, even if you are cursing the fact that you’ve stood on boy’s Lego and had to move a stray coffee cup with a dead bug in to get there. Protein!

Heat

Apart from Final Draft, or whatever other application you use, sod draughts. You need to be warm and snug to get settled down to writing. This is especially true here where the weather seems to blow in rain, hail and snot at any given moment.

Pass the tissues.

Bite

No. Cannibalism is never an option and can, in fact, be a huge drawback to a writing career. No agent worth their salt will publish you if you’ve got them dangling over a bubbling soup pot. What I mean by bite is once you’ve got a gem of an idea and something on paper plot what you are going to do in manageable bites. If you have a script, plan scene to scene, if you’ve a novel by chapter to chapter. Then if you get stuck, you’ve simply to go on to another scene, or chapter if you’ve a block and head back later for another bite at the bit that you couldn’t swallow the first time.

Regurgitate

Okay, so maybe not the best term to use but for me once I’ve written something, it always seems a good idea to read it back with the editing side of my brain and see if there is any area that could use tweaked like that stray hair on your chin that you pull where your leg shoots up. (Too much information, thought so.) Anyway, if you read over your scene, or chapter, often you will find that you have an excess word that gives you a run on line, maybe even you’ve changed tense and it spoils the flow of the writing. So sometimes it can be good to save the scene and rewrite it with another tense and see which reads best and gives the best continuity.

So, there you have it. Off to write, though all that talk of biting has left me a bit peckish… and the cat’s giving me the face, the Lego needs picked up and the five minutes not writing has just given me an idea.

Off to write, though maybe by way of the kettle, procrastinate, who me!