In my last post I talked about the importance of warm-up writing. It’s magic. It gets you past the creaky, just-woken-up feeling in your writing and straight into the part where you remember why you love to do this.
But doesn’t it seem like warm-up writing will steal time from your ‘real’ projects?
Making Time
I’m always saying that no-one should wait until they ‘have’ time or ‘find’ time to write. You need to make time.
As a twist on that, warm-up writing actually grants us me more time to write the good stuff.
Time Crunch
Last year I took part in my first NaNoWriMo. I also had a part-time job and a family to look after. Finding time to write 1667 words every day for 30 days was a challenge.
At first I skipped the warm-up writing because it just seemed like such a waste of time.
Gradually, however, I realized I was still doing my warm-up writing; only I was writing it into the novel. Starting my novel writing every day was painful, stilted, creaky. Only when I got to about 750 did it start to flow.
So I started taking the 20 minutes to write my 750 words on things that didn’t matter.
Then, I would plunge into my novel, fresh and raring to go. Before I knew what had happened I was flying past my daily deadlines.
Of course, I started doing warm-up writing every day (OK, most days. I’m not that smart.)
So how about you? Do you do warm-up writing? if you do, what and where do you do it? If you don’t, why not?