I would never have thought my brain would work to "manager's schedule" either, because I believed focused concentration for a prolonged period of time was the only way I could achieve creative "flow".
What I actually found, however, was that after more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted writing my brain gets tired and I start to be overly self-critical, prone to excessive editing and overworking of the text, and slow to generate new creative ideas. I may even start feeling blocked or at least stuck, and frustrated about the quality of the work I'm doing.
When I force myself to take a break every 60-90 minutes even when I feel like I'm on a roll (indeed, especially if I feel that way), and end mid-sentence or mid-paragraph rather than trying to complete a full scene or thought before pausing, my subconscious keeps ticking away on the writing even as I'm folding laundry or taking a walk. When I come back to my laptop for the next round, it's a lot easier to get back into the flow of writing, which is why I can write 1000-1200 words in 3-4 hours when I used to bang my head against the keyboard for 8 and still end up with significantly less (and worse) output as a result.
The other big plus for me is that keeping "office hours" with my writing, which for me means taking off at least one day a week and quitting no later than 4 pm each day even if I haven't written as many words as I'd like, pushes me to make better use of my writing time while I've got it -- but it also keeps me from feeling overworked and resentful about writing because I don't seem to have time for anything else.
Julia Morgenstern's book NEVER CHECK E-MAIL IN THE MORNING is another good book if you're interested -- she's the one who taught me to deliberately shorten my overall daily writing time so I'm forced to focus on it exclusively instead of trying to multi-task and frittering chunks of it away. She calls this technique "crunching your container", and it's definitely helped.
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Date: 2017-Oct-27, Friday 11:45 pm (UTC)What I actually found, however, was that after more than 90 minutes of uninterrupted writing my brain gets tired and I start to be overly self-critical, prone to excessive editing and overworking of the text, and slow to generate new creative ideas. I may even start feeling blocked or at least stuck, and frustrated about the quality of the work I'm doing.
When I force myself to take a break every 60-90 minutes even when I feel like I'm on a roll (indeed, especially if I feel that way), and end mid-sentence or mid-paragraph rather than trying to complete a full scene or thought before pausing, my subconscious keeps ticking away on the writing even as I'm folding laundry or taking a walk. When I come back to my laptop for the next round, it's a lot easier to get back into the flow of writing, which is why I can write 1000-1200 words in 3-4 hours when I used to bang my head against the keyboard for 8 and still end up with significantly less (and worse) output as a result.
The other big plus for me is that keeping "office hours" with my writing, which for me means taking off at least one day a week and quitting no later than 4 pm each day even if I haven't written as many words as I'd like, pushes me to make better use of my writing time while I've got it -- but it also keeps me from feeling overworked and resentful about writing because I don't seem to have time for anything else.
Julia Morgenstern's book NEVER CHECK E-MAIL IN THE MORNING is another good book if you're interested -- she's the one who taught me to deliberately shorten my overall daily writing time so I'm forced to focus on it exclusively instead of trying to multi-task and frittering chunks of it away. She calls this technique "crunching your container", and it's definitely helped.