How to Find a Writing Groove

Write-alongs, and why you actually do have to fake it til you make it

If I were not chatting with you, I could just sit down and write.

I could be on a plane, or sitting in a noisy coffee shop, or ignoring hockey practice. In my car, in my living room, my office…with my phone sitting right there. In fact, if the phone’s face up and it lights up with a notification, I would flip it over without checking.

Because I am, at long last, solidly in this draft.

Admittedly, it might not last—I’ll hit some bit that I haven’t got properly sorted yet and the distractions will become much more alluring, but experience tells me I’ll be able to get past that moment a lot more quickly now as long as I keep my head in the game. Even if I can’t write for a day or two, as long as I open the file, both physically and mentally, I should be able to stick with this until I have a full, honest-to-gosh draft.

How did I reach this enviable state? Because a week ago, as you know, I was gnashing my teeth and wailing.

I forced it.

I sat down and stared. I set timers. I stuck in airpods, I hid my phone, I put myself in a wifi-free zone with no entertainment options other than this draft. I tied myself to the mast, in effect. I committed to y’all and to myself that I would write 1667 words a day and while I did not achieve that every day (6 out of 10) I did something every day to make this happen.

And now it is—at least for the moment, and again, this is not my first November by any means. I haven’t written yet today (it’s Monday 11/10 as I write this; write-along coming this afternoon!) but I know I will.

Look at me tempting the universe over here. I really want to say well, I could get hit by a bus, but as I’m not planning to leave my house before I write that’s really quite unlikely.

Things could happen, sure. But they probably won’t, and I did the work so far to set myself up to be able to cope with most of them.

Yes, it took more than 10 days. I just looked back at how long I’ve been prodding and outlining and thinking and drafting and re-creating and making a whole new Scrivener document for this story, and I’ve been at it one way or another since January. The first file is dated 1/3/25. (And if it’s of any encouragement to you, before that I worked for almost 2 years on a different draft that I have now abandoned for various excellent reasons. Damn, that’s really not encouraging to me.)

But I hacked my way through that forest, and this draft is going to happen.

WHEN? As in, when this week can we write together? This week’s write-alongs, which are paid supporter only, are as follows:

ALL TIMES EST

Monday 11/10 1-3PM

Thursday 11/13 9:30-11 AM

Friday 11/14 10:30-11:30 AM

(Is that enough time to write 1667 words? Maybe sometimes, maybe not…. these are more the times I KNOW I can be with you at my desk than my actual only writing times. That would not work.)

See you there! Link after the paywall. (Not a supporter yet? You will probably wish you’d done this because we have another Blueprint coming in January and of course the whole Booklab first pages thing which people love, and I’ve realized this was way too little for the amount of work we put into all this and I am turning it off Friday and going back to the old supporter price which is probably still too little and I know, we should give in and do ads for supplements and AirBnB but I don’t wanna.)