(not necessarily in this order, depends on the moods and activities in the house)
1. Revise. Right now I am in the middle of revising a finished draft. I’m working on plot issues, character development, and overall making it sound less amateur hour. I’m making great progress, but it’s one of those things. Sllllloooow. I’m so tempted to jump into the next project and write, because the writing stage is what I love the most, but I’m forcing myself to be loyal to this story until I finish it. I saw a great quote recently:
“Many drops make a bucket, many buckets make a pond, many ponds make a lake, and many lakes make an ocean.”
-Percy Ross
I work with about six pages a day, which feels like I’m not making any progress. But slowly, paragraph by paragraph, I am. And when I am in a position to spend more time on my writing (AKA when I don’t have a 2 month old baby), I’ll do even better.
2. Writing skills. I make it a point to study something in my writing books every day. Sometimes I’m reading new books. Right now I am re-reading books. Even if it’s for five minutes or less, I find it invaluable to be able to refresh my memory about a lot of great advice. Yesterday I re-read a section in a book about writing a mission statement when you make your outline. I totally forgot about it. I decided to take it a step further–how about a mini mission statement for every scene? So I know what the purpose of every scene is and I can cut accordingly.
3. Outlining. I’ve allowed myself to start working on the outline of my next story. I don’t spend a lot of time on it, but I do play with it a little bit each day. I want to be able to plunge into my next story when I’m ready.
4. Journaling. Since childhood, I’ve been a journal-er. I try to journal and/or blog daily. I have online ones and old fashion paper ones.
Teresa Shimogawa 