by Patricia Bradley, @PTBradley1
Do you ever wake up and not want to jump out of bed and get to the computer and write? I don’t know about you, but I have. Not that I don’t love writing, but sometimes I just don’t want to get started.
It happens to all of us. For me, maybe I stayed up until two a.m. reading. Or maybe I have a cold or just plain don’t feel good. Could be I’ve just returned from a conference or a trip visiting my family, and I’m exhausted. Or maybe I’ve hit a wall, and I don’t want to face peeling myself off of it and figure out what went wrong…
Enough! This isn’t a post about the excuses. It’s a post on how to overcome the excuses! So, I’ll get right to it.
- Get up earlier because you’ll need it for #2 (sometimes that’s easier said than done, especially on a cold morning).
- Grab a cup of coffee or whatever jumpstarts your day and sit down behind the computer and write. It doesn’t matter what you write—it can be a grocery list—although it would be better if it was part of your story. Right now my word count for the day is 1300 words. I try to write a Nifty 350, as James Scott Bell calls it, before I get breakfast. Often I get on a roll and keep working until I have 500 words. That’s over one-third of my word count for the day.
- Stop for breakfast and your quiet time alone with God. This refuels both your body and spirit. Take time to pray and among other things, ask God to guide your day and help you get your word count.
- If you have a day job, think about your story during the day—the boys in the basement will work on it while you’re doing other things. Then carve out some time after you get home.
- If you’re a full-time writer, set another goal to get another 500 words before lunch. Again, if I get on a roll, I’ll get 800 words and that’s my word count for the day. Now I can run errands or any of the hundred or so things that pull me away from writing.
- Repeat the next day.
This is what has worked for me through fifteen books. Is writing easy? Wait a minute, I thought I heard someone say yes…let me get up off this floor. Just remember that anonymous saying I posted several months ago:
Success is that place in the road where preparation and opportunity meet, but too few people recognize it because it often comes disguised as hard work.
Deception, Natchez Trace Park Rangers, Book 4
When ISB Ranger Madison Thorn arrives in Natchez to investigate a white-collar scheme, she has no idea she will be thrown back into the violent crimes division–or that it will get so personal. She’ll have to work with her childhood-enemy-turned-handsome-charmer to unravel the clues before it’s too late.
Patricia Bradley is a Carol finalist and winner of an Inspirational Readers’ Choice Award in Suspense, and three anthologies that included her stories debuted on the USA Today Best Seller List. She and her two cats call Northeast Mississippi home–the South is also where she sets most of her books. Her romantic suspense novels include the Logan Point series and the Memphis Cold Case Novels. Deception, the third book in the Natchez Trace Park Rangers series, releases August 2, 2022. She is now hard at work on a new series set in the Cumberland Plateau around Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her writing workshops include American Christian Fiction Writers online courses, workshops at the Mid-South Christian Writer’s Conference, the KenTen Retreat and Scrivenings Press Author Retreat where she was also the keynote. When she has time, she likes to throw mud on a wheel and see what happens.