‘Finishers Edition’ Writing Camp Day 2
Let’s follow that plan!
Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be! And welcome to Day 2 of Writing Camp: ‘Finishers Edition’!
Before we get started, let’s all congratulate ourselves for the plans we made yesterday. Hooray! Yay us! We are masters of our writing destinies!!! At least, that’s what I feel like whenever I make a writing plan (which is probably why I make so many of them).
What Day 2 is all about
On this second day of Writing Camp: ‘Finishers Edition’, we’re going to focus on how to work through the Ingenious Plans we made yesterday. It feels good to make a plan (I’m still riding that high!), but making plans and following plans are two very different skills. Making a plan requires forethought, realism, and organisation. But what does it take to follow a plan?
Looking back, looking ahead
In order to follow your plan, you need to know (a) where you stand now and (b) where you go next.
I know, right? Duh.
‘Duh’ it may be, but it’s also an important habit to get into, particularly when you’re trying to get something completed in a short amount of time like, say, during a 5-day writing camp. In order to get where we want to go, we need to get oriented.
So let’s take out those plans we made yesterday. Did you manage to achieve your Day 1 tasks?
If you did, awesome! Scroll on down to today’s prompts and plunge into your task for Day 2!
If not, don’t panic! This is very, very normal!
I try to have a plan for every working week that looks a lot like our Cunning Plan table for this edition of Writing Camp. Every day when I sit down to write, I glance at that plan to see whether I can cross things off (dopamiiiiiine!) or whether I need to get something done. And most of the time, a task I assigned to one day of the week ends up bleeding into another day (or two).
When that happens, I make a note of it by adding the incomplete task from the previous day to the list of tasks to be completed on the current day. But I try not to let it take over on the current day. In other words, when I’ve got to keep moving towards a larger weekly goal, I give myself a set amount of time to complete Yesterday’s Task before moving on to Today’s Task. On a Good Writing Day, I can get maybe 4 hours of productive writing done. So if I’ve got a task left over from the previous day, I might give myself 1/8 of that time (30 minutes) to try to get that task done before I move on to the current day’s task.
Sometimes the results aren’t pretty. And that’s ok! Because—and here’s the important point—the goal for this week isn’t to produce pretty writing: it’s to finish a piece of writing. (I’ll try to run a ‘Pretty Writing’ edition of Writing Camp another time.)
So as we move through the rest of Writing Camp, remember to start each day by checking in with where your project stands and what you need to do next. I shared some other tips for how to do that in the first Writing Camp—you can find them here. And if you’d like to try out my writing planner, you can find my monthly writing planning template here!
Day 2 Writing Prompts
Pick whichever one feels right for you.
Option 1: Freewriting
If you didn’t try producing a freewritten description of your daily task on Day 1, I encourage you to try it today.
If you did the freewritten description of your daily task yesterday, let’s try something different today. Read through what you produced on Day 1, even if it’s just your freewritten description. Then set a timer for five minutes and freewrite about whatever comes to mind—it could be your own sense of where you’re heading, your thesis statement, a particular character, an image, a word. Do not stop. Do not look back. Do not worry at all about using perfect punctuation or sentence structure. Just empty your brain onto the page.
You can use this exercise to jump-start your writing task for Day 2. If you feel like you need to break up your writing day into different stints, you can (a) set yourself a goal for your next writing stint today (e.g. set a timer for 20 minutes, or set a goal of writing at least 200 more words) and/or (b) try out Option 2 below.
Option 2: Directed prompt
Yesterday’s prompt was about maintaining focus and motivation. Today, let’s think about the connections that hold your Writing Camp goals together.
Take 10 minutes and write about what connects your writing task for Day 1 to your writing task for Day 2. This could involve, for example, actually writing out the transition itself (e.g. a short paragraph or scene that connects the two tasks), or it might involve writing a short explanation of some sort (e.g. something for your reference only, or something that would help a reader/editor understand what holds the two tasks together).
Option 3: You do you
If you’re at Writing Camp for the camaraderie and accountability rather than the prompts, that’s great! Do your own thing, and let us know about it in the chat!
Ok, folks: time to write!
I’ll see you tomorrow for Day 3 of Writing Camp!
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VB,
M