Halfway through my work in progress, I switched from computer to pen & paper. (Here's the moment of the switch.)
It's not that I get distracted with internet and social media; it's that I get distracted so easily on the sentence level that I can't help but revise and delete and fix and agonize at them to get it right.
So, I'm tricking my brain into writing by hand. I'm following Terry Pratchett's process where he writes one day and then edits the next day. For me, I will write by hand, and the next day I will type it up on the computer as a form of revision and edit.
It's working great so far. 25 minutes in, and I've written about 400 words. The "type up" took another 15 minutes for those 400 words, which I whittled down to 350. This is ways better than sitting in agony as my brain wants to correct everything on the word processor.
So, lesson learned? Experiment. Try new things to get words on paper. Read up on your favorite authors or any authors, and find out if you can steal or innovate on their process. Eventually you'll find how your writing brain works.
Here's my current writing station
It's not that I get distracted with internet and social media; it's that I get distracted so easily on the sentence level that I can't help but revise and delete and fix and agonize at them to get it right.
So, I'm tricking my brain into writing by hand. I'm following Terry Pratchett's process where he writes one day and then edits the next day. For me, I will write by hand, and the next day I will type it up on the computer as a form of revision and edit.
It's working great so far. 25 minutes in, and I've written about 400 words. The "type up" took another 15 minutes for those 400 words, which I whittled down to 350. This is ways better than sitting in agony as my brain wants to correct everything on the word processor.
So, lesson learned? Experiment. Try new things to get words on paper. Read up on your favorite authors or any authors, and find out if you can steal or innovate on their process. Eventually you'll find how your writing brain works.
Here's my current writing station