My Writing Routine
I Am a 4-Hour Work Week Writer - Not By Choice But By Chance
My writing routine to help you win your writing game
I am a freelance writer, a mother, and a homemaker. Being a freelancer means, you can work from the comfort of your home, you got to choose who you work with, when you work, got to tweak your work routine according to necessity. (As my routine gets tweaked according to my child’s school routine). These are perks of being a freelance writer that I like as it allows me to be with my child 24/7.
But there are downsides too. You have to deal with a lot of things when you are a freelance writer. You have no immediate boss to look upon so it becomes extremely difficult to get work done before the deadline. If you don’t follow a proper writing routine, you might keep on delaying your writing work. When you work from home, you have many other struggles to deal with. Like constant distractions of surrounding activity, interruption of family members, kids, unexpected guests, and neighbors.
I face all of these. Writing in solitude sounds true luxury to me. As being mother and homemaker, almost 80% of my day passes by in motherly duties and household responsibilities.
However, I love writing. For me, it is like detaching myself from the rest of the world. I crave the 20% writing time that I get in a day. In those 20% (i.e. 4 to 5 hrs average on most of the days), I read non-fiction books, write posts on Medium and LinkedIn, write for my Copywriting Newsletter, and do freelance writing work.
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The writing can become a daunting task when you are low on energy and time. So I prefer to write in the early morning hours. I wake up at 5 a.m.(but can’t write in those peaceful hours). The very first thing I have to do is prepare my child’s lunch, then get him ready for school and drop him off at his school bus stop. Once my child leaves for school, I take a morning walk, followed by breathing yoga, preparing for breakfast, and then having my breakfast.
(As mentioned in the book The Boron Letters by Gary Halbert, that walking is the best activity for writers. It provides some me time, helps flush off unnecessary thoughts from your mind, makes new ideas emerge, and makes your mind ready to work on writing).
My productive morning hours (approx 4 hrs) are occupied by these chores that I can’t change. But after that without wasting a single minute I take a glass of warm water along with me and sit to write for the next 40 to 60 minutes.
(Stephen King says, in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, that make some activity a starting point of your writing like having a glass of water, a cup of coffee, or tea. It will single your brain that it is writing time and make your brain ready to write).
After the first writing session, I take a small 10 to 20-minute break for household work and then get back to writing again for the next 40 to 60 minutes.
As mentioned by Anne Janzer in her book The Writer’s Process: Getting Your Brain in Gear, breaks between writing are necessary to boost your writing quality and help your brain incubate the ideas. She says, when you write two systems are working in your mind, i.e. scribe and muse.
Scribe helps you to write with focus. Once your writing is done, take a break, at that time muse takes over and make connections between your research material, written stuff and ideas. With this your mind pops up with so many ideas with connection to your written stuff. These things happens, while you are not writing and doing some other things. So these breaks between your writing process are very necessary for qulity writing.
Read the story The Writer’s Process: Writing Made Easy (For Medium) to help you understand writing process better.
In a day, I only get these 2 hours of time to write (40 to 60 minutes of 2 writing slots. With 10 to 20 minutes of break in between). The rest of the day goes into household chores and my child’s studies.
In the afternoon while my child is having an afternoon nap, I do my reading. I am an avid reader and I love to read non-fiction books. On most days, I manage to read for 2 hours approx.
Stephen King says, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut…”.
As you can see, I can only write for 2 hours and read for 2 hours a day. As rest of my day goes into my motherly responsibility. But that is what make my life called ‘4-Hours Work Week’, not by choice but by chance. And I am happy with this schedule.
This routine really helps me write quality stories. Though I am not actively writing for the rest of the day, the muse takes over, and my mind incubates the ideas on my written draft (As mentioned by Anne Janzer in her book The Writer’s Process: Getting Your Brain in Gear). So next time when I sit to write, my story comes out polished.
I hope this story is helpful in your writing journey!
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