220: All About Writing Sprints

 

If you've ever felt like you're doing this whole writing thing "wrong" or you've felt guilty for not following advice another writer has given you, this week's episode will help! I give you 6 writing permission slips on everything from not outlining your book before you start to hating promoting yourself on social media. 

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All About Writing Sprints

 

Hi friends, welcome to Your Big Creative Life podcast. Thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. I'm really excited about this week's episode because I've been, I don't know, I've like seen some comments recently from people on social media, like new writers who were kind of encountering this idea of a writing sprint for the first time. And writing sprints are, I'm not being dramatic when I say that they completely changed my writing life. Hell, they changed my life overall. And so I thought it'd be helpful to just break down what a writing sprint is, how I recommend structuring this, how I use writing sprints, why they're so effective, so that this is something you can incorporate into your writing life if you want to. Okay, so I want to talk about writing sprints. Before we get into specifics about what they are, I want to share when I was introduced to this concept because it really, again, it really did change my life. Okay. When I first started writing, I would sit on the couch. I was living in Washington, D.C. with Sam, my husband, now husband. And I would sit on the couch. I would have my laptop on my lap, sit on the couch before work and like try to write. But I was also talking to Sam and I was drinking my coffee and I was checking my phone and I was like playing with a cat and I was thinking about work. And I was multitasking. And it would take me 30 to 45 minutes to write like 200 words, which is fine. I mean, I want to just make that clear. Like, that is fine. That's actually good. It's progress. I was making progress on my book. I was writing. I was setting aside time to do it. Like, it's all good.

But the problem is that I was feeling so frustrated by it because it was taking me just so fricking long to write. And I remember just having this feeling of being so discouraged and like, my God, it's going to take me a fricking decade to write a book. Like, how am I ever going to finish this? And it just, yeah, it just was really discouraging. So that was kind of how I approached starting to write my book. And then sometime, I don't remember exactly when it was, I was, there's this organization called Cave Day that hosts these work sessions for people who work from home or who are freelancers or just like, I don't know, need support with focusing on work. And so that you would, it was like a membership thing where they would schedule work sessions. You could log on to Zoom and it was called like going into the cave. And you would basically just focus, do focused work for like 50 minutes. And there were all these little rituals around it. So you would like take a second to get focused, set some goals, set some intention for the work session. And then there'd be specific music that you could listen to, like ambient music that didn't have any lyrics. And then you would like emerge from the cave after 50 minutes or whatever. And they have these scheduled throughout the day.

And I remember looking at some sort of like presentation that they had done or or something, talking about focus and talking about how, like monotasking, essentially, where you're just really trying to get into a deep flow state. And that's why multitasking just doesn't work for us. People like to, like, we like to think that we're good at multitasking, but we're really not. And there's all this research about how when you get interrupted, when you're doing a task, it takes you so long to get focused again. And this was like, I mean, I was introduced to all of this research and all these concepts like in 2018 or 2019. I mean, it was a long time ago. And I think that my attention span has gotten even worse since then, honestly. And I think it's true of most of us because of our phones, because of social media. And so just having the ability to really focus for a short amount of time is, A lot of us have trouble doing it, which is why I think having a short session is important, but anyways, we'll get into that later. So, what I started doing is really being intentional with my writing sessions, and I started thinking of them as sprints as opposed to writing sessions, because in the past it was like, Oh, I'm gonna sit down to write. And it was just sort of this unstructured thing, and I'd try to write for a bit, but again, it would be like 45 minutes, an hour, an hour and a half, and I wouldn't make much progress.

So I started thinking of these principles that I was learning about productivity and research and habits and focus, and thinking about how I could bring that into writing. And I started playing around with it. In the beginning, I set aside 30 minutes, maybe even 45 minutes. I can't remember. I played around with the length of time. And I found that for me, shorter is better. And now, I mean, writing sprints are how I make progress. I do not sit down to write for longer than 30 minutes unless I'm editing. So my process is I write and I get the first draft out very quickly. I don't go back to edit as I go. And then once the first draft is done, then I go back to edit. And when I'm editing, I can focus on it for longer because it's a different skill, it's a different part of the writing process, and it feels like I can do it for longer. But when I'm just getting the rough draft out, it's hard for me. I just want to do it quickly. Yeah. That might not be your process, which I guess that's something I should say in the beginning. Like, of course, there's no one correct way to write a book. And if you are someone who thrives with doing long sessions, like a three hour block, four times a week, that is awesome. I'm not here to try to convince you to switch your process if it's working for you. I just want to talk about why this is so beneficial for me, my clients, like writers that I know, and talk about how to do this. So just disclaimer, there's no one correct way to do this.

And if you have a process it's working, that's great. Okay, so yeah, so when I'm writing the first draft, like this is how I do it. I just do not have two hours in most, on most days to sit down and write. And honestly, my attention wanders. I just cannot focus on my book for that long. I don't know. Yeah. Maybe in the future, thinking about, okay, down the road, if I'm like a full-time best-selling author and this is more a part of my actual job, like maybe I could do that, but at least for right now, I have too many other things going on. I have to balance this with work. I have to balance this with content creation. I have to balance this with being a mom, like so many other things. So this is the way that I'm making it work now. Okay, so that's my history with writing sprints, and I want to talk about a few important, like the anatomy of it and how to structure this and my tips. So #1, reminder that a writing sprint is a writing session that is focused. It's a specific amount of time, and it requires you to write as fast as you can. So again, a writing sprint is not two hours. If you are doing a two-hour writing session, but you're calling it a sprint, that's not really a sprint. The way that I think about this is 30 minutes max. That's the cutoff. Because any longer than 30 minutes, and really more like 20 to 25 minutes for me, I've found, longer than that, it's difficult to sustain. My focus starts to wander. I'm less productive. It's just like, I need to take a break and come back to it. And then if I want to, I can do another sprint, sure. But that's kind of the top end of it.

It's a specific amount of time and it's focused. So you are monotasking. You are not doing all those other things I mentioned doing when I was talking about my history with writing when I first started trying to make progress on my book. You are only writing. And related to writing, you are not multitasking in the sense that you are doing other things related to writing. So you're not brainstorming. You are not editing. You are not researching things. You are not making notes. You're not doing character work. You are only typing. You are only putting words down on the page. Now you can certainly do a brainstorming session. Okay, y'all, I just spilled water. I'm in this, I'm in this like little pod in my co-working space and I just spilled a cup of water, so I had to stop and wipe it up. Thankfully it didn't get on my laptop, just the very edge of the keyboard. I grabbed it in time. That could have been so bad. I could have just fried my MacBook that I got a couple of months ago. Oh my God. Okay, anyways, back to it. I don't know what I was saying. Writing session. Anyways, that's I know what I'm saying. You can have like a brainstorming session or, a research session or sprint, like that's fine. But a pure writing sprint, if we're talking about what that is, it's just writing. Now, the other thing that's important is this writing as fast as you can part. Again, it's a sprint. That's why it's like maximum output as thinking, like getting the words out as quickly as you can.

This is going to sound a little insane when I say this because, it just is going to sound a little insane, but you almost have to turn your brain off a bit when you are writing. And what I mean by this is turn down the volume on that voice in your head, that inner critic, that perfectionist who wants to get everything close to perfect on the first draft. Meaning that you have picked the perfect sentence, the perfect adjective to describe something you have structured the sentence perfectly before you can move. on. You have written a character's line of dialogue that is just so perfect and authentic and flows great. Like, you have to stop being so precious about the words. Even if you're like, yeah, this is really bland and flat and like kind of boring and basic, that's okay. Just get the words down. When I am doing this, My, I write thrillers, so I need to have some suspense. I need to have some tension present for a large chunk of the novel, right? Oftentimes, my first draft just looks like A-frame of the story. So the sentences might be pretty basic, where I'm just like moving the characters around. I'm not really including a ton of description about the setting. The dialogue might be a little bit flat.

All those things, that's fine. I will go back and add in layers of description and complexity and nuance and elevate my vocabulary a little bit so I'm not including like the same basic words over and over again. All that happens later. A writing session for me, or a writing sprint rather for me when I'm getting the first draft out is purely like, just go quickly, get it down. This is what helps me write pretty quickly. This is how I was able to get my rough draft of a book out in a little over 30 days. Technically, it wasn't exactly 30 days because I had started writing it before the 30 days, but 95% of it was done in 30 days because I dictated so much of it, which we'll talk about again in a second, in a couple minutes. But just writing sprints, like this is how you do it. Okay. Now, a couple of tips for preparing for a writing sprint so that you can be effective once that timer starts going and you can just, you're off to the races. Take a couple of seconds before you start the sprint, before the timer starts, to refresh your memory about where you are in the scene and or think about what's coming next. If you are a plotter and a planner and someone who knows exactly what's going to happen in your book, you probably already know like what's coming up in the scene that you're writing. What's this next scene, this next chapter that you're going to be working on?

You probably already have a good idea of that. But even if you are someone who's a pantser where you have not done a lot of outlining, you're just kind of writing and like seeing what happens, seeing where the story goes, figuring it out as you go, you can still do writing sprints because what you do is just take 30 seconds before the timer starts to think through, okay, I left off with this character coming into the kitchen to talk to another character. What do I want to happen in the next couple of pages? Just get an idea. And then once the timer starts, you can go, you can write that scene because you know roughly, okay, these two characters are going to have a conversation in the kitchen. Here's what needs to happen. Boom, I know where I'm going. So that's how to use your prep time before the timer starts. That way when the timer's running, you're not like doing brainstorming really. I mean, you might have to pause for a second to kind of think about something, but you're not taking long pauses to brainstorm during a sprint. You can also ritualize it. This is a great habit to get into if you are someone who likes routine and consistency and This is just something that your brain craves. Because if you start to ritualize it and you do the same thing every time, it's almost like it clues your brain in. Like, okay, we are going to write, we are going to sit down and be focused.

And it helps you, it helps lower the resistance or the friction, and you just can automatically get to that place of like being ready because you've done this before. Your body, your brain knows exactly what's going to happen. So this means lighting a candle, having the same drink, writing in the same place every time. When I hosted, I used to have a membership for writers a couple of years ago, and I would host weekly writing sprints for the people in the membership. And something that we would do before the timer started is I was, I would, for the timer for the writing sprint, is I would set a one minute timer and we would just take some deep breaths. So it's almost like a mini meditation, right? I would close my eyes, take some deep breaths. This was an opportunity if people wanted to use that one minute to think about the scene that they were going to be working on, they could. Or sometimes it's just nice to have that moment of like getting grounded and arriving in this present moment to focus on writing. So just taking some deep breaths, something like that every time before the sprint starts. That's something that I still do now because I really like it. Yeah, so just anything you can do to ritualize it.

Now, I know that some writers are, it's better to mix things up. you might be someone who thrives on novelty. Like one day you write in a coffee shop, the next you are writing on the couch, then you're dictating in the car, then you're writing standing up. So if that's you, that's fine. But maybe there's just, you know, you can vary up the location, you can vary, switch up how you write, but maybe there's just like a 30 second or a minute kind of bit of deep breathing that you do before you start your sprint every time. That's something that you can implement if you're someone who does like to switch it up. So, and I want to touch on dictating really quickly because I did mention that as part of my process. And dictating is, I have an episode on dictating that we did, I don't know, a couple of months ago, maybe. And What I do now, my process is I will open up Microsoft Word, because that's where I write. I write my book on Microsoft Word. I will open it up on my phone or my iPad. I have the app. And I'll refresh my memory about like where I'm at. And then I'll press the microphone button and I will speak my book. And I'm actually writing. I'm not like doing outlining or creating bullet points. I am talking as if I'm typing on the keyboard to get it down.

This just helps me. It helps me take advantage of time to write that I have in my day. I dictate in the car sometimes, which is where I press, I open up my Microsoft Word app, I press the microphone button, and then I set it down. So I'm not looking at my phone while I'm driving. It's just transcribing what I'm saying. It's important to note that there's no generative AI in the sense that I'm not dictating into an app that is then improving it for me or suggesting things. Everything I'm saying is my words. All Microsoft Word is doing is transcribing it and getting it down on the page for me. That's it. So yeah, that's a great thing to do. And because I do it when I'm doing other things, it's like, I don't know, on a 20 minute drive from daycare, that's already a writing sprint because I'm just talking. Even sometimes at home, if I'm like, you know, I want to write, I want to work on my book, but I don't have a ton of time or energy, sometimes I'll just do a ten-minute sprint, open up my Word doc, and either type or dictate into it, and the thing about dictating for me, I have found, is that I can get more words out than I could if I was typing, and I think part of the reason why, for me at least, is that... Even though when I'm typing on my laptop and I'm writing, even though I don't go back to look at what I wrote before, I still can't help but be aware of it. And there's a bit of separation when I'm dictating where I don't see the words on the page. So it's like, I don't know, it just, that helps. And then also for conversations that are very dialogue heavy, or scenes that have conversations with a lot of dialogue, it's helpful to dictate because I get to talk out the conversation. then that helps it flow better and feel more natural, I think.

Of course, I still have to clean it up in editing, but. So yeah, that is the anatomy of a writing sprint. Remember, 30 minutes or less. If you are familiar with the Pomodoro method, I should have mentioned this at the beginning. The Pomodoro method is very similar to this. The Pomodoro method says like 25 minutes of deep work followed by a 5 minute break, 25 minutes of work, 5 minute break, et cetera. And you just do that for however long you want, like your whole workday if you want. It's similar to that, except again, you don't have to do 25 minutes. You don't have to take the five minute break, but you can stack writing sprints. If you do a 20 minute sprint and you get a ton of words out and you're really in flow and you're like, wow, that was incredible. I want to keep going. Awesome. Stand up, stretch for 30 seconds, get a cup of coffee, come back, do another sprint. You can absolutely do that. You can stack. Yeah. And again, you can do sprints for brainstorming or researching or whatever. Particularly with researching, it can be helpful because I've found that for me and for clients, sometimes research can be a bit of a time suck or a black hole, where it's like, no, I have to research this thing. And then before you know it, like 3 months have gone by and you're like doing research or world building. And it's like, well, okay, at some point you actually have to start writing. So yeah, try this out. I hope that this is helpful for you.

Again, it really has changed the way that I approach writing. And it's a way to to, I mean, I talk so often about fitting writing into your life, not putting your life on hold to write a book. This is how you do it. This is how you do it. That way, if you have a super demanding job, if you have kids, if you have a lot going on in your life, you can still write a book and do it in a way that is manageable and doesn't require you to burn yourself out or sacrifice everything to get it done. Because that's not healthy. That's not sustainable. I'm not interested in doing that, and I don't think any of us should operate that way as creative people. We need to have balance. So try this out. Good luck, and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for listening.

Katie Wolf