When lockdown kicked off early last year, one of my first thoughts was, “No more long business trips! I get to stay home!”
I’d been doing several multi-week trips to see clients and go to conferences every year since 2015, and I was pretty ready for a break (#introvertproblems).
But since nearly all the marketing for my business happened at these in-person events, I needed to figure out a different way to bring clients in the door.
I decided that podcasting was the perfect option, and I’ve done dozens of great interviews in the past year.
What I did not realise is how much podcast people love to hear about writing routines.
Writing routines are, apparently, the holy grail of routines — magical, mystical, daily moments of communing with the muse. They rise above the drudgery of normal routines and elevate the writer with them. They are all that is good and pure about creative work.
Right?
All the writers that get these emails are giggling right now.
For all your best efforts, writing routines are really more like statements of intent.
You might want to write for two hours every morning, and many mornings you will in fact get it done. But there will also be many mornings where you had to schedule a call or go to the doctor or fight some kind of life-admin fire, and the writing will have to wait.
Writing routines also change with the seasons of your life, and you know what? That is FINE.
Sometimes you’ll write in the mornings before anyone else in your house is awake.
Sometimes it will be crammed into the last half-hour of the work day.
Sometimes it will be a long luxurious session late at night with a glass of wine, and sometimes it will happen squished into two-minute increments because there’s just no other time.
Yes, having a set time and a set goal for your writing each day is great, and that has worked for me before.
Lately, having a set sequence of events that happens (no matter what time of day I get started) is more useful.
There’s no right or wrong way to do a writing routine. It can help to hear about what other people do, but experiment with what works for you.
It’s not really the routine that makes you a writer — it’s the fact that one way or another, you sit down regularly and write.
Focus on what you want to write, and for whom, and the rest will fall into place.