Hitting my stride

Generally I am a creature of habit.  Habit is where my comfort zone lies.  Like many novice writers I struggle to create a pattern to write consistently.  It isn’t a matter of lack of desire, or lack of time, or procrastination.  It’s a matter of habit.

Graham Greene was once asked if he wrote my creativity or routine (or close to that).  His response was that he was fortunate in life in that creativity found him at 9:00 am every morning at his typewriter.  Greene touched on the key.  Inspiration and creativity don’t strike a writer out of the clear, blue sky unexpectedly.  It happens when we work.

Recently my content/development editor suggested I needed to add two chapters to my manuscript to further character development and set up events that occur later in the novel.  Intuitively, I knew his suggestion had merit but I didn’t have a clue where to start.   The lack of self-direction became the perfect excuse to delay working on this project.

We agreed to meet for lunch and for some reason I told him I would have the chapters for him when we met.  This promise became my deadline.

The deadline did the trick.  I sat down to write and I fell into a natural pattern.  Write four hours in the morning.  Take an hour lunch break.  Work for two hours after lunch.  Quit every day by 3:00 pm.  It worked!  I completed the chapters after about three drafts each and was able to deliver them when we had lunch.

I discovered that I had hit my stride, a pattern of work that fits for me.  I’ve been looking for this for years.  I’m so relieved I finally found it.

Share with me your story of how you hit your stride – or didn’t.