[Encore Presentation of] Well Said Wednesday: Games Writers Play
It's Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. which means at least three things: turkey dinners will be eaten on Thursday, massive shopping will take place or be avoided like the plague on Friday and many of us will be traveling on either end of the weekend. AAA estimates that 51 million Americans will pack it up and head out of town this weekend.
Which can be very good for your writing goals, as explored in this post from earlier this year. Breaking out of your routine, the stillness of an airplane all can move our writing process into overdrive. I'm a big writer-while-traveling (not when it's car travel and I'm the driver, of course!) It's just one of the tricks writers use to get the work done. Enjoy this encore blog presentation on ways you can push yourself into writing mode and have a fabulous Thanksgiving!
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A Earlier this month, I took a quick weekend trip to Washington, D.C. to attend a reception and spend some time with family. I wasn’t there long and had no work to do. Still, I packed my laptop. That’s because I was going to be on two, two-hour flights and airplane passenger me is a wildly productive writer. Maybe it’s the (sometimes) lack of wifi, the freedom from distracting phone calls and Facebook pings, or just knowing there’s not a heck of lot else to do. The words just flow from the window seat.
I am not alone. I once read that Simon Sinek, author of a really useful book called Start With Why, used to book plane trips solely to give himself focused time to write.
“And on most planes, there are no plugs, so I’d open up my computer and wrote until the battery died. Because I had this pressure of knowing the battery would die, I wrote monumental amounts in short periods of time,” he said in a 2009 New York Times article. Well, said, Simon.
If you have to create content for your business, realize that productive writers often create weird little games to get the work done.
We race against a dying battery or get on an airplane to write in a distraction-free zone. Less drastically (and considerably cheaper), we set timers and force ourselves keep writing until the buzzer rings. Or we set a word count count goal and write until we hit it.
Mastering your message takes effort. But it doesn’t mean effort can’t look a lot like a game.
What tricks help you be well said? Tell me about it in the comments or over on the
More time to read this holiday weekend? Check out these posts on the art and science of getting our writing done:
September Issues and Being Your Own Editor-in-Chief