Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be! And welcome to Day 3 of Writing Camp!
This is the magical day when you will graduate from having done ‘a couple’ days of writing and be able to claim that you’ve done ‘a few’ days of writing. ‘Some’ days of writing. Heck, let’s go ahead and call it ‘several’ days of writing.
Woohoo!!!
What Day 3 is all about
On this third day of Writing Camp, we’re going to focus on settling into a rhythm. This is when your sense of what your writing practice is will start to emerge. Because by now, you can start to make some observations regarding what has and hasn’t worked for you so far. Today, we’ll be thinking about routine.
Revel in routine
I love reading about other writers’ writing routines. Every time I read one, I’m looking for both new ideas (‘Ooh! I want to try that!’) and things that are more familiar (‘Yay! This awesome writer also likes writing in their pajamas!’).
There’s such a range of writing routines out there!
Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Vonnegut liked to write early in the morning (apparently Vonnegut also interspersed writing with push-ups and sit-ups, which sounds like a great way to Get Ripped While Writing—maybe a theme for another Writing Camp?).
Mark Twain would write while shut away in his study (his family had to call him by blowing a horn if they needed him during the day).
Agatha Christie wrote her stories back-to-front, scribbling ideas into dozens of notebooks she kept close to hand at all times.
W.H. Auden wrote until cocktail hour, when he’d mix himself and anyone who happened to be standing nearby a couple of stiff vodka martinis.
Henry Miller believed in only writing one thing at a time (though, as PBP readers will know, this isn’t something I necessarily adhere to).
P.D. James would simply sit down and write whatever scene she felt like writing that particular day.
Edith Wharton apparently wrote in bed. #Queen
One of the most striking routines I’ve come across is Maya Angelou’s:
I usually get up at about 5:30, and I’m ready to have coffee by 6, usually with my husband. He goes off to his work around 6:30, and I go off to mine.
I keep a hotel room in which I do my work — a tiny, mean room with just a bed, and sometimes, if I can find it, a face basin. I keep a dictionary, a Bible, a deck of cards and a bottle of sherry in the room. I try to get there around 7, and I work until 2 in the afternoon.
If the work is going badly, I stay until 12:30. If it’s going well, I’ll stay as long as it’s going well. It’s lonely, and it’s marvelous. I edit while I’m working. When I come home at 2, I read over what I’ve written that day, and then try to put it out of my mind.
I shower, prepare dinner, so that when my husband comes home, I’m not totally absorbed in my work. We have a semblance of a normal life. We have a drink together and have dinner. Maybe after dinner I’ll read to him what I’ve written that day. He doesn’t comment. I don’t invite comments from anyone but my editor, but hearing it aloud is good. Sometimes I hear the dissonance; then I try to straighten it out in the morning.
You can read more about Angelou’s and other writers’ routines here.
There are probably very few of us who can afford to keep a hotel room on the side (or who would want to write in ‘a tiny, mean room’). But there are probably a lot of us who also need to be in a particular place where we’re a little bit cut off from the world, whether it’s any room with a door you can lock, or whether it’s a particular seat in a library. When I was working in Oxford, I had a favourite spot in the Radcliffe Camera where I felt like I could melt into the background, even when surrounded by industrious undergrads. When I was finishing my second book, there was a particular coffee shop I liked to work at (I even had a favourite chair there).
It took me awhile to notice what my favourite writing routine was, but I remember exactly where I was when I finally did notice.
It was during the final years of my PhD, when I was living in Selwyn Gardens, Cambridge (which, despite what it sounds like, is a street and not a sanatorium). I found that I got the most writing (and the best writing) done on days when I got out of bed, grabbed a mug of milky tea and a slice of toast with raspberry jam, and sat right down at my desk, in all my dishevelled, pajama-ed, un-made-up glory. Even now, on some mornings I ask Le Swiss to take our Gremlin to school so that I can sit right down, without changing out of my pajamas, and write.
So before you get on with today’s writing, I invite you to reflect a bit on what has and hasn’t worked for you over the past few days. Did you write at a particularly productive time of day? Was there a particular kind of prompt that worked for you? What over the past couple of days has made it easier for you to write?
Try doing one or two of those things today, and find out which ones seem essential to your writing practice (and please let the rest of us know what they are!!).
Note: This is also a good day to play around with the duration of your writing practice. If you’re feeling up to it, try to extend yourself a little bit: do more than one of the prompts below, lengthen the duration of the prompt you choose, or try to do ‘multiples’ of a single prompt.
And if you’re finding it easiest to maintain a writing practice by just doing one prompt per day, stick to that. Remember: the goal of this Writing Camp is to develop good writing habits, and by ‘good writing habits’ I mean those you can maintain relatively consistently!
Day 3 Writing Prompts
Pick whichever one feels right for you.
Option 1: Freewriting
Look at the breadcrumbs you left for yourself yesterday and freewrite on any aspect of them for 5 minutes. Remember: Do not stop. Do not look back. Do not worry at all about using perfect punctuation or sentence structure. Just write as though nobody’s watching (because they aren’t).
If that’s all the time you’ve got for today, that’s fine! Take a moment to assess where you stand, and leave yourself breadcrumbs for Day 4. As always, these could take the form of explicit instructions (‘Pick up on this idea and expand on it’) or a tiny description of what comes next (‘Next I want to set the scene for X by doing Y’).
If you feel like you could keep going, you can either (a) set yourself a goal for the rest of your writing day (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 or Option 3 below.
Option 2: Directed prompt
For those who’d like a little more direction: first, take a look at what you produced on Day 1 and Day 2—these will help you to keep an eye on where your piece comes from and where you want it to end. Then, keeping these in mind, take 10 minutes to write about one of the following:
One scene that HAS to appear somewhere in the middle of your story.
One piece of evidence that is absolutely crucial to your argument.
A couple of ‘beats’ that you want to run in a specific order somewhere in the middle of your piece (bonus: see if you can come up with a couple of variations on each one).
One stanza that HAS to appear in the middle of your poem.
A summary of one middle section or chapter of whatever you’re writing.
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 get writing!
Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow for Day 4 of Writing Camp!
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M