This week is all about being a more productive writer! I started off with a brief post about a little known writing disorder called hypergraphia, then moved onto a more traditional post about being more prolific.

Today I’m going to continue with this theme, but in a slightly different way. Rather than talk about ways to make time for writing or writing more during each session (both great topics), I’m going to talk about avoiding burnout as a writer. Actually, there are two separate issues here: burnout and boredom. They’re very different, but still somewhat related in their causes and cures.

When writing becomes boring
Yes, even writers can get bored with writing. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer or that you’ve used up all your creativity. When you think about writing on a very literal level, it is just marking down seemingly random symbols that have a very arbitrary relationship with anything in real life. There’s an entire theory that goes along with this very idea called deconstruction, something I’ve taken entire classes on and still have a hard time understanding.

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Just about every writer wants to become more prolific. If many of us had the choice, we’d quite are day jobs and lock ourselves in our rooms for the better part of the day to devote to writing. Sadly, this remains just a fantasy. We have other responsibilities that include family, jobs, social engagements, errands to run and the many other mundane details that fill our lives.

Just your imagination
But being a prolific writer doesn’t have to be a dream, nor do you have to suffer from hypergraphia to write large quantities of material. Having an active imagination helps, although it’s not a direct requirement. How can this be? Isn’t writing fiction and poetry fully dependent on imagination? Well, yes and no. It takes imagination to come up with story ideas and work out character and plot details. There’s no doubt about that. But actual writing is more of a matter of discipline and perspiration (ie. hard work).

The process of writing is creative one. When you physically start to put words onto paper to create sentences, and those sentences then create paragraphs and so on, until you have a completed manuscript, you are performing a creative act. Creativity begets creativity. So even if you are not, or don’t think you are, creative enough to be a writer, you will start to become more creative as you write more. In other words, creativity can be gained and is not inherent in finite quantities in our brains.

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One of my favorite blogs (I have many favorites actually), and one I read on a daily basis is called Copyblogger. Yes, it’s geared more for marketing/corporate type writing, but many of the writing tips they offer can work across the board, whether you’re writing your first novel or copy for a client’s newsletter.

This particular post, Five Easy Steps to Editing Your Own Work, caught my eye because it talks about one of the hardest tasks that most writers face: editing your own work! Us writers are a introverted bunch, especially when it comes to sharing our work with others. This is especially the case when we are starting out because we doubt our abilities and worry about rejection. The result is that editing one’s own work is much more preferable to the agony of actually letting someone else read that short story that took six months to write (don’t laugh, I’ve taken longer).

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There’s probably nothing worse than writing most of a short story, then, when it comes time to end the story, your mind goes completely blank and you end up just tacking something on to finish the damned thing. Am I right? Or am I the only one who has this problem from time to time?

Before tackling the issue head-on, it might be good to look at this from a reader’s perspective. They take the time to read your beloved story. They make an emotional investment in your main character and take great interest in the plot. Let’s pretend, just to be more dramatic, that the reader has stayed up all night reading your story (it’s a long story) and they near the ending just as the sun is starting to peak over the horizon.

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This weekend provided me with some much needed free time to relax after a rather hectic week at work. Although I didn’t feel particularly inspired, I managed to get several more pages written on a short story I have kept putting off for several months now. If I had gone much longer without writing anything, the story risked being lost forever and would probably end up in some dusty file in the back of my filing cabinet.

That didn’t happen. I managed to sit down and write! Like I said, I didn’t feel all that inspired. But I wrote anyway and I probably wrote more than if I had felt inspired. Then, last night I read over some of my latest additions to the story, and they weren’t all that bad.

I like to compare inspiration to that one friend everybody has, the one you can’t count on for anything. And every once in a great while, this friend finally comes through and really gets you all revved up and excited, only to abandon you once again for an undetermined amount of time. Inspiration is the same way. It makes an appearance just enough to lull you into thinking you can depend on it, but it rarely pulls through when you want it to.

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You don’t have to be a Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald or even an Emily Dickenson to leave a literary legacy behind. In fact, you don’t even have to be a published author at all. How is this possible, you ask? The answer can be as simple as keeping a journal. Or, maybe you’re a little more advanced in age and have experienced some interesting things throughout your life, then the answer lies in writing down your memoirs for future generations to enjoy and even study.

A journal entry a day keep writer’s block at bay
Cheesy sayings aside, keeping a simple journal has dual benefits: you create a written record of your life as you experience it, and for those serious about writing, it helps to hone their craft. Writing every day, no matter what form, will help your writing improve. It’s all about practice, practice, practice.

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There’s a pretty large divide that runs through the writing community, even extending into the general population. There are those who say that being able to spell correctly is imperative to being a well-educated person. But then there are those who say that by itself good spelling isn’t all that important – the important thing is the ability to use your resources (ie. dictionary) to correct your bad spelling.

I tend to fall into the latter group. I don’t think being a great speller is a huge asset for a writer. It might save a little time, but that’s about it. In the end, as long as a writer can recognize and correct spelling mistakes, then that’s all that really matters. In fact, in college I had many Teaching Assistants, all who were PhD students in English, who couldn’t spell if their life depended on it! But what sets them apart from many others is their willingness to take the time to look words up for their proper spelling.

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About a year ago I was working at a small craft store for the summer in an attempt to ease the financial burdens posed by financing a college education. One of my co-workers was an artist, a very talented painter who not only helped customers in the arts department, but also taught oil painting in a small classroom at the back of the store.

I struck up a conversation with him one day about painting. I made a comment that I had tried my hand at painting, but found it difficult. He laughed, and then told me that anyone can learn to paint. The technical requirements are actually quite easy. He said the hard part is painting something that is inspired and original. In other words, he said you have to have something to say.

That struck me as being true with writing. Anyone can learn to write well. It’s not hard. Once you get a handle on the basic grammar, practice is all it takes (and a lot of reading, as I have maintained in previous posts). But what is really hard, especially in fiction, is to write something that is fresh, creative and "inspired". I have read a lot of fiction that is good as far as mechanics go, but it lacks that inspiration that separates it from great fiction.

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Whether you write short fiction or novels, you always want people to read until the very end. The worst thing that can happen is a story or novel fizzles out and the reader gives up. I’ve done it before. And I’m sure I have written many works of fiction that struggled to hold the reader’s attention.

Here are a few "tricks" you can use to keep your readers hooked until the very end:

- Break the action up: This means if you have an action scene, break it up with other scenes in between. This is one way of building suspense. So if the reader wants to know who broke into the woman’s hotel room (for example), then he/she will have to keep reading to find out. This is kind of a cheap trick because it’s so obvious, but it works!

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I usually don’t post twice on a general writing topic like time management, but I came across a post from another blog that I read daily and thought I’d share it with the rest of you. This blog is geared mainly for copywriters (ie. non-fiction), but the tools given can easily apply to us literary types as well.

If you want to refresh you memory, then you can re-read my earlier time management post here:
6 Time Management Tips for Writers

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