Tuesday’s writing tip for authors

If you want to learn how to manage your time and complete your book on schedule, explore Donald Murray’s many books about writing, including A Writer Teaches Writing. Don was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a popular Boston Globe columnist, a passionate friend to all writers, and a member (emeritus) of Published & Profitable Editorial Board. Don was always willing to share his ability to leverage short daily writing sessions, such as 30-minutes a day, into weekly autobiographical newspaper columns, a new book, and frequent updates of his previous books each year.

Don’s productivity was based on nightly reviews of the topics he wanted to write about the next day. In his words:

If I know tomorrow’s writing task today, I can harvest in a matter of minutes what has grown during the previous 24 hours.

Don Murray continues:

We should remember that during the busy hours of work and living our physical lives, we are also living a mental life reflecting, observing, remembering, connecting, playing words and phrases, building forms and knocking them down, hearing voices. When we sit down to write, we are drafting, documenting, shaping, and redrafting, what flows from our mind.

You may only have an hour a day, a half-hour–or just twenty minutes–to sit before your computer, but if you have told your subconscious tomorrow’s writing task, you will surprise yourself by what you have to say. The writing is there, ready to flow. You will write what you did not know you knew.

This is from Don’s privately published and distributed monograph, Welcome to the Writer’s Craft, 2002.

I’ve been using this technique for years, printing and reviewing project mind maps before I go to sleep at night, and continue to be surprised at how effectively it works.