Writers in the Storm

Jamie Raintree

There has been one goal I've spent my entire writing life trying to accomplish and failing miserably at: waking up early to write.

Over the years, many challenges have played a role in keeping me from mastering this habit. First, it was simply not having a reason to get up that early. I've worked at home for myself for most of my life, so I didn't have anyone waiting on me and have often taken full advantage of that. Then, it was being up most of the night with my girls when they were babies and toddlers and, let's face it, even still sometimes. And then, unfortunately, a decline in health which I have since mostly recovered from.

These days, as a published author, business owner, and someone who wants to live a life of intention, my desire to set a calm and productive tone for the day outweighs any obstacles and I'm proud to say that the habit is finally starting to stick and it has transformed my approach to the day, as well as how smoothly my writing goes.

WHY WAKE UP EARLY?

The tactic of waking up early is becoming widely shared amongst professionals and those who strive for optimal health, productivity, and progress toward their goals. In fact, there's an entire book written about the importance of waking up early, how to use that time effectively, and techniques for making it happen, called The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, which I highly recommend.

There is one major reason to wake up early and it is this: you set the tone for your day with purpose and intention.

Too often, we let others set the tone for us when we wake up to the alarm clock (or maybe even after hitting snooze a few times) and immediately rush out of bed to get to work or to get the kids to school on time. Be honest...is your first thought of the day, ughhhhhhh? Is your first emotion panic or anxiety? It's hard to have an enthusiastic, joyful, and productive day when you begin the day in reactive mode. Reactive mode always leads to overwhelm and negativity.

When you start the day on your terms, not only do you have more control over your day, you're also more likely to have positive emotions at the beginning of the day and by extension, the rest of the day. Both of these benefits will have an extremely positive influence on your writing.

WHAT TIME, EXACTLY, ARE WE TALKING HERE?

Your first instinct might be to either get up half an hour early and try in vain to be productive during that time, which will very unlikely happen, or to get up two hours early and spend that entire time writing. I would caution against either approach. In the first instance, a half hour will fly by in the blink of an eye and you'll end up stressed anyway, trying to fit writing into such a short amount of time. In the second, when you spend the entire time writing, you're more concerned with checking something off your to-do list than setting the tone for the day. I've tried and learned from both.

What has been successful for me is to wake up 1 - 2 hours before you need to do anything for anyone else, and before you need to get ready to leave the house. This may sound painful or maybe impossible, but once you design this time to fulfill all your heart's needs, and you see the boost it gives your writing, you'll be hooked.

For me, even though I spend only half an hour writing in the morning and maybe accumulate a few hundred words, it has made my writing time later in the day almost doubly as productive. The first week I got up early consistently, I had my highest word count week for the entire year! I credit my morning routine for getting my head in the story right off the bat, which keeps it in the forefront of my mind all day, instead of coming to the page cold.

TIPS FOR WAKING UP EARLY

For me, the hardest part of waking up early is the getting out of bed part. It's not that I haven't gotten enough rest or that I don't want to get up, it's that my bed is cozy and sleeping in feels decadent and who doesn't need more decadence in their life? The trick then is to make getting out of bed more compelling and more decadent than staying in it. Here are a few tactics that have worked well for me:

Use HALF of your morning time for writing.

Listen, we love writing. Obviously. But let's be honest, it can also be a chore. Getting up to work, isn't really compelling. (For those of you who do already write early in the morning, you are magical creatures and we scorn you.) Therefore, use the other half of your time to do something that you enjoy, or better yet, that excites you! Read, run, do yoga, watch a TV show, take a bubble bath--doesn't matter! As long as it makes you WANT to get out of bed and makes you look forward to that time.

The Alarmy App on iPhone and Android.

This is not your ordinary alarm clock that you can hit snooze on and roll back over. In order to turn off the alarm, it forces you to wake up your brain and get your butt out of bed! There are options for shutting off the alarm, such as shaking it vigorously, completing math problems, or my favorite, taking a picture you set the night before. I use a picture of my coffee maker so in order to turn off the sound, I have to go downstairs and line it up perfectly to get the right shot. By the time I'm down there, I'm already up and might as well just get the coffee started. This is probably my #1 tip for making early mornings happen.

Drink water immediately.

This is my #2 most important tip! I have learned a lot about health in my quest for healing but I'll make this short and sweet: your body heals aggressively while you are sleeping because it is finally relaxed enough to do it. This is why sleep is so important. (And why stress and overworking are so detrimental--your body doesn't get enough rest to heal during the day, which it also needs.) Healing requires copious amounts of water, which is why you are almost always dehydrated when you wake up whether you realize it or not. If your bladder can handle it, drink water before bed so your body has a head start on proper hydration and then top it off in the morning. I keep a water bottle by the bed and am already drinking from it before I've fully opened my eyes. SO. IMPORTANT.

Prepare the night before.

It isn't so much about shaving thirty seconds off your coffee routine in the morning so much as it is about setting your mind toward the early wake up. As you go through the checklist--make sure the coffee pot has water and grounds, set out yoga mat and yoga clothes, put a favorite book by the couch with a glass of water--you visualize your morning routine and further cement the habit into your brain. Saving yourself a few minutes in the morning is an added bonus.

Is this a habit you think you'd like to try to implement? Have you tried it before--what worked and what didn't? If you are a magical creature and already have an early morning routine, share your tips!

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About Jaimie

Jamie Raintree is an author and a writing business teacher. She is also a mother of two girls, a wife, a businesswoman, a nature-lover, and a wannabe yogi. Her debut novel, PERFECTLY UNDONE, will be released on October 3, 2017 by Graydon House. Subscribe to her newsletter for more writing tips, workshops, and book news. To find out more, visit her website.

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Kathryn Craft

The city of Tokyo is in a precarious spot, balanced at the juncture of four tectonic plates. Even as Tokyo’s inhabitants conduct daily life and continue to build upward, somewhere in the back of their minds they are anticipating a sudden shift in any one of these plates that will remove the ground beneath them.

Today’s publishing world is similarly positioned. Its author inhabitants are trying to build careers on top of shifting plates outside our control—we might name them Publisher, Agent, Reader, and The Economy. You might think you have everything aligned—your perfect advocate will find your work its permanent “publishing home”—but this is modern capitalism, not family life. When a market shift occurs, everyone must scramble to protect their bottom line.

It is difficult to build something lasting on uncertain ground—but it’s not impossible. Since Japan is the world leader in anti-seismic building technologies, let’s look at what the adaptations they’ve made can teach us about building a sustainable publishing career.

A foundation concretized with writing craft and business savvy is a great start, but might not be enough to keep your career from crumbling in the case of a quake. Because here is what Tokyo’s architects have learned about concrete foundations: when poured over a shifting world, they are prone to cracks.

In response, these architects are developing new strategies. Hydraulic dampers allow the façade to absorb seismic energy. Base isolation technology lets the building separate from its concrete foundation so it can float, then settle. Looser bolting systems allow movement. New super-elastic alloys can pull a twisted building back into position.

In other words, from the outset, they are building flexibility into their design.

Build flexibility into your career design

How can you build the type of flexibility into your writing career so that it might withstand sudden market shifts? Here are five ideas that can be employed at any stage—but the earlier you can embed them into your growing career, the less damage a quake will inflict.

• Get real. Accept that you alone are the architect for your career. Editors and agents can be valuable advisors, but they have enough buildings going up that if one topples, they have others to work on.
• Say aloud: “I am not my fear.” Career quakes might not threaten life and limb, but the fear of losing respect, earning potential, and self-concept is real. Use a looser bolting system to that fear. Feel it and let it go. When you settle back onto your base, you’ll realize that you are the same career architect you were right before the quake was felt. You might have a bigger challenge before you, but since the days you first began digging your foundation, you have grown in the skills needed to tackle it.
• Ask: How can this challenge help me? Quakes shake things up. How could that inspire you to find new building materials? Could you write in different genres under different names? Try different forms, such as screenplays or essays? A setback need not diminish you. It could inspire you to grow.
• Seek the support of other writers. When your high-rise optimism cracks, writing friends can pour on the flexible perspective that allows your twisted sense of self to regain its shape. Through valuable give-and-take, friends can tether each other’s buildings to safer emotional ground.
• Love the writing. Career stagnation need not equal writing stagnation. If you love to write, do that. Stockpiling projects in itself creates the blocks that build a career. On the days when writing is all you have, the deep satisfaction it brings needs to be enough.

Today’s authors build careers on shifting soil, that is a fact. But adaptations created by Japanese visionaries suggest that sudden shifts needn’t tear down a career. We can plan for ways to absorb the shock when the inevitable happens. Then, while others turn a blind eye to the rumbling from below, you’ll be able to use your greater emotional flexibility to keep reaching for the sky.

To buoy each other up, let’s share: What moments of deep satisfaction sustain you as a writer? What methods have you used to shore yourself up when a setback rattles you?

 

 

Kathryn Craft  is the award-winning author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy, and a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft. Her chapter “A Drop of Imitation: Learn from the Masters” was included in the writing guide Author in Progress, from Writers Digest Books. Janice Gable Bashman’s interview with her, “How Structure Supports Meaning,” originally published in the 2017 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, has been reprinted in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, both from Writer’s Digest Books.

“Picture them in their underwear.”

Has there ever been a more stupid piece of advice? Yes, I know it was delivered by none other than the quintessential dad of my generation, Mike Brady.

https://youtu.be/jElVDJ2iV8c?t=23s

But his perm and that piece of advice were both mistakes. That trick might make you see your audience in a new light — or wish someone would turn off the lights — but it won’t actually make your presentation better.

What can? Below are five quick tips for making your workshop more engaging for your audience.

1. Consider your hook.

You’ve heard a million times how stories need a great hook. Why would presentations be any different? “I’m here to talk about blah, blah, blah” doesn’t grab an audience’s attention. Figure out a better way to hook your audience and introduce your subject. Here are some hook ideas:

• Personal story
• Intriguing facts/statistics
• Poignant example
• Joke related to the topic (No willy-nilly “an angel, a demon, and a writer walk into a bar…”)
• Object lesson
• Interactive quiz

Your introduction doesn’t need to be long, but enough to excite your audience and make them believe it’s worth listening to the rest of what you’re going to say. You can also use your hook to establish rapport and express your unique personality (what we call voice on the page).

2. Break the presentation into parts.

However long you’re given to speak to your audience, it’s too long. That is, our attention span for a speaker lasts maybe 15-20 minutes. Thus the popularity of TED Talks, which aim for no more than 18 minutes!

Given this attention span, an hour-long speech means you have to gain your listeners’ attention with the opening hook, but then regain it two more times. The best way to do this is to present information in chunks.

Break up the long presentation by:

• inserting a video clip
• including a breakout session
• pausing to take and answer questions
• sharing an example
• telling a story

Any time you shift how you present information, you create an opportunity to reclaim your audience’s attention. Mix it up, and be creative in maintaining their focus.

3. Make sure you have a takeaway.

We can concentrate so much on what we want to say that we don’t consider what we want our audience to hear. But ask yourself:

• What is the crux of what I want to communicate?
• What takeaway do I want attendees to have?
• What is the call to action?

Knowing your ultimate goal helps you decide which content to include and which isn’t all that important. It also ensures you organize your talk in a way that you end with the conclusion you want your audience to draw. Don’t make this presentation solely about what you can present; ask what information your audience could really use.

4. Practice, practice, practice.

When I wrote my first writers workshop, I thought it was in pretty good shape. But I decided to practice aloud. Thank goodness. I had included way too much information, my points meandered, and even I would have supremely bored if that had been the presentation I actually gave. But I made critical changes that refocused my content and felt much better about the result.

Look, once you stand up and present the way you would in the actual room, you get a far better idea of how things will go. It’s particularly difficult to know how long your presentation will run based on the script or outline you have on the page. Take the extra time to do a run-through and identify potential problems. Then fix them before you arrive.

5. Relax and enjoy.

If you’ve been booked as a speaker, your audience wants you to succeed. Those writers want to learn from you. They’re rooting for you.

Don’t picture them in their underwear (please), but do remember they’re human. Moreover, 20% of people report a fear of public speaking, so one out of five in your audience are already impressed that you’re up there and definitely want things to go well for you.

So try to relegate your nerves to a minor role, and let your passion for the subject and your camaraderie with other writers carry you through. In short, enjoy yourself.

What practical tips do you have to offer to writers preparing a presentation? What do you believe engages audiences best?

About Julie

Julie Glover writes cozy mysteries and young adult fiction. Her YA contemporary novel, SHARING HUNTER, finaled in the 2015 RWA® Golden Heart®. When not writing, she collects boots, practices rampant sarcasm, and advocates for good grammar and the addition of the interrobang as a much-needed punctuation mark.

Julie is represented by Louise Fury of The Bent Agency. You can visit her website here and also follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.