A couple of weeks ago I wrote that knowing ‘why’ you are writing makes figuring out the ‘how’ easier.

But it’s not a magic spell. It’s not that having-a-clear-vision-of-what-writing-means-to-you suddenly leads to National Book Awards and infinite riches, or some zen-like state of contentment with your writing practice.

You do, also, have to think about how you will fit writing into your routine.

Simply believing you’re meant to be a writer doesn’t get the job done.

Why Without How

Recently I came back from a longish trip to Scotland, full of clarity about what I want to work on. It was exciting…in the abstract.

But each day, when I got up, I was unsure of what I should work on today, and each day I found myself pottering around with tasks that felt like ‘writing’, but weren’t actually helping me progress towards my (clear) goals.

I hadn’t ‘reduced to practice’ my desire to write. I hadn’t thought, specifically about how I would get it done.

Every day I fell into that old trap of asking myself what I felt like writing today.

Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Making decisions uses up energy (literally. They can see it on brain scans).

Writing, it turns out, is a series of decisions that we need to make on behalf of all of our characters.

If we waste all our creative juice on making ‘how will I work today’ decisions, we leave ourselves less energy for the important creative decisions that go into our fiction.

What’s the way around that?

Have routines.

And I know many of us rebel against routines, as creative people, so I’ll be talking about that more in upcoming issues.

But for now: what habits and routines do you have in place to help you get to the page? What do you struggle with?

Leave a comment and let us know: