Turbocharge Your Writing — 12,000 Words in Two Hours! from James W. Ziskin

Is life/work balance, a myth? When you are pulled away from the middle of a manuscript by life having more important priorities for you, how do you mark the place where you are in your head and how do you find your way back into it quickly? A second question do you work on more than one project at a time? And is that confusing?

I have no work-life balance. It’s an inner-ear thing. That’s why I compartmentalize my work, my play, my family, and my writing. I teach high school French, and when school’s in session, I don’t write. I concentrate on the obvious tasks required of educators: prepping lessons, teaching classes, correcting tests, and screaming at students. En français, ça va de soi. I simply can’t multitask and get any writing done from September to June. But then over the summer, I dedicate my time to churning out a first draft of something new. Last summer, I managed to write 85,000 words in forty days. While it’s true that 3,659 of those words were “the,” I spelled it right every time.

Should I be embarrassed that 4.3% of my book was the definite article? If so, perhaps I shouldn’t mention that the indefinite articles A and AN accounted for another 2.3% of the book. 

SOLID-GOLD WRITING TIP: 

For your books and short stories, write all your definite and indefinite articles first. Once you get those out of the way, you can attack the tougher words like AND, OF, and TO. In my last book, those came to 6,343 more words. So, last summer, using just six words, I wrote 11,986 words out of a final total of 85,000 in just a couple of hours. That’s 14.1% of the book! Who said writing was hard?

I actually wrote all those words in about two hours. Disclaimer: Not all at once, but spread out over forty days.

(Wrestling my tangent into submission…)

Back to the question at hand, how do I find my way back into a book or story I’m working on when I’ve been pulled away? I sometimes imagine my ideal reader reading my book. Somehow that makes me feel as though I’m not completely wasting my time. I also re-read what I wrote the day before, and that helps. I also use music—no vocals—when I’m writing. Lyrics tend to muck up things when you’re trying to put words on paper. But instrumental music helps me.

SOLID-GOLD WRITING TIP: 

I’ve mentioned this once before in this space, but since no one reading this blog had the good sense to see the genius of it, I’ll repeat it now. A swift-moving fugue will get you writing in a trice. Something about the rhythm and tempo hot-wires my brain. The synapses fire, sending sparks to my fingers, which tap along merrily to the music. It really works. My favorite example is Bach’s passacaglia and fugue in C minor, transcribed for orchestra. Here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Sbk3E8-ws I’m using it as I type this. Try it!

As for whether I work on multiple projects simultaneously, the answer is no. As I mentioned above, I can’t multitask. PAY ATTENTION, FOR GOD’S SAKE! In fact, in life and work, I tend to obsess and zero in on one thing at a time. I don’t like to water down the efficiency and energy my single-mindedness brings to the exercise, just as I dislike diluting the Scotch I drink. Speaking of which, time for a drink. See you in two weeks’ time. I expect you to write at least 12,000 words by then. And no misspellings!