Sunday, December 21, 2014

Sunday Mornings and TIME...

find me all over the place...

Sunday, Sunday... a day to take stock of all that we have accomplished during the previous six days... a day of respite and relaxation but for most writers, also a day of serious reflection.

An author is nothing if not a clock watcher. How much can get done in fifteen minutes otherwise wasted? Time is a useful tool that a prolific writer puts to work at every turn, which may well annoy hell out of those around him or her, and yet we all know nothing gets completed without our noses to the grindstone, and we only get there, to that grinding when we use our time wisely.

Setting goals begins with time at the job. Treating one's writing as a job or career puts us in the frame of mind that we need a schedule, and if not a schedule an attitude that prompts up to get things done and use our time well in the process.

Putting work off and off and off as a procrastinator is only good and worthwhile during the staging or planning or research phase of writing a full-length work of fiction or nonfiction for that matter. Pages only accrue if we put in the time.

People call time a man-made artifice and as true as that may be, we still have to use it and not let it use us entirely; that is allow time to wash over us as if we have NO control over it. In order to get a novel thought out, organized, written, edited, rewritten to completion, we must rope time and ride it like a bucking bronco--that is, if we really and truly want to have a finished product at the end of our labors.

While writing may be a labor of love, it is also the product of a great deal of blood, sweat, tears, and TIME put in. Without being conscious of time and ignoring it as a useful TOOL for the author, said writer will accomplish less, lesser, less still.

Time is a precious commodity; give over to it those things you prize. If you truly prize writing, you will create a time and place for it to happen. And yes, a writing space/place is just as important - a setting where one can utilize writing time without the many distractions that are pulling at us all the TIME. Distractions that rob us of our time at the keyboard.

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