Writing time, sleep and exercise: On Habits, Good and Bad, by Harini Nagendra

Question of the week: What bad habits have you ditched to make yourself a better writer? What good habits have you picked up?

I've always written while holding down a full-time job, so I need to squeeze in writing time into my non-working hours. If I have to think back over the past decade of writing, in which I have written 8 books, fiction and non-fiction - finding time to write has been my biggest challenge. Even harder: finding uninterrupted time in which to write, because interruptions always make their way in: people come into my room to chat, an urgent email lands in my inbox, a crisis erupts at work or home, the courier guy rings the doorbell... 

So: good habit 1. I used to feel really guilty about locking myself in my room to write. Instead, I would leave the door open to be available to everyone - and then grumble about how hard it was to write without interruptions. Likely fed up with my irrational behavior, my daughter made a "Do not disturb" poster one day (a really pretty one), hung a piece of string around it, and handed it to me - now I use it when want silence, lock my home office, and - write in peace.

Good habit 2 follows on the heels of good habit 1. I used to need a nice long stretch of time - a few hours at least - to get into the writing zone. Most of my writing was done after 9 pm, when my family was winding down for the day - and off I would go, to my computer, where I would type till 2 or 3 in the morning. But now I'm a decade older, and can barely keep my eyes open by 10 in the night. If I do stay awake to try and beat a deadline, I find it tells on my health the next day. So I write in spurts, with a target of 1000 words each writing day. It took a bit of effort to retrain myself, but it works well.

Good habit 3 is to make sure I keep time aside for exercise - the aches and pains I was once able to shake off after a few days of intense typing are more stubborn and long lasting these days. I need my daily exercise. Besides, since I'm not engaging in binge-typing sessions, I have more time for exercise and sleep.

What are the bad habits I've got rid of? 

I guess I know my writing quirks a bit better now. I know what words I tend to overuse ('large' being one of them - often the first descriptor when I describe a new place) and I look for them and weed them out. 

I also have a better intuitive sense of when to accept my editors' comments, and when to stick with my own judgement - in the past, when I have edited sections of a book against my own gut feeling in response to an edit, I have found readers point to those very same sections, complaining that they don't read well - and I agree. Fortunately, I've had great editors on my books, and most of the edits I get have really improved my prose - sometimes though, I need to stay with the text as I see it.

Finally, though I'm still not much of a plotter, I've started to create more of a timeline as I go along. Previously, I used to scramble at the end, after I wrote the first version, thinking - was this a Sunday? Two days after the previous scene, or a week later? Now, I write it down as I go along. I'm not perfect - my editor and I just fixed a discrepancy in the timeline of my latest book, Into the Leopard's Den - but it's far easier than before.  

Into the Leopard's Den releases on 1 July!