Writing - Routine, Rejection and Rationale

 

 

Like most of us at the moment, my days are very similar. 

Here is my routine:

1. I get up 
2. I eat breakfast (Frosted Wheat every day. It's not healthy but I don't have to waste time putting sugar on it as they have done it for me...Mornings are tough!)
3. Drink my standard sized vat of coffee to ensure complete alertness,
4. whilst watching either BBC News or what ever I recorded the night before that my husband didn't want to watch.
5. Make freshly brewed coffee to put in a flask and take upstairs (so I don't have to traipse up and down stairs spilling coffee as I go)
6. As the coffee brews load/unload dishwasher and tidy kitchen
7. Go upstairs, turn laptop on. Stare at blank page in word or
   
8. edit something I have already written or 
9. mooch about on social media until it's lunch time and realise I have wasted a whole morning.
10. Lunch
11. Return to edit, stare or mooch. Submit things I have written to magazines, publishers, agents.
12. Read the rejection letters (occasionally I get an acceptance but the rejections are a higher percentage). Spiral into gloom. 
13. Go and bother the cat who was quite content, and fast asleep on the bed (my office is in my bedroom). 
14. Stare at the ceiling for a bit.
15. Return to desk and write, usually getting my mojo at about half past three.
16. 4pm time to make dinner for the returning family, who have all been at work, school or college (when not locked down here with me).

Obviously, motivation is the trick. I am not paid by anyone to go upstairs and write stuff - I write because I love to write (and hopefully some day, someone will pay me for it). So having a routine is essential, it would be easy to stay downstairs and watch TV all day, but what would be the point of life?

I want to leave something of me behind, regardless of whether it is published or not. And I can't help myself, even when I was working full time, I wrote a diary. At the back of my diaries you will find story ideas and poems, and since 2009 I have done this, as well. 

If you ask any creative person why they do a thing, it is because they have to, there is no choice it's what drives them. I have notebooks from when I worked in an office, in the margins, I doodled, I wrote verses, I imagined stories, all whilst looking grown up, making decisions and taking minutes. 

So what's your routine, what makes you tick, what inspires you?

My inspiration comes from my husband, my daughters, my family, my friends and the things around me. I watch the news and despair at the world, but then I write something and feel a tiny bit better. Maybe somebody read what I wrote and it meant something to them? Maybe I made someone smile? Maybe I made someone feel less alone? These are things I feel when I read books, articles, look at art. It reminds me when I feel the world is unredeemable, that there is an underbelly of rather lovely creatives who are fighting the battle to keep the light shining in the world.

So keep going, as Dory said in Finding Nemo, 'Just keep swimming...'

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