EARLY PRODUCTIVITY

Early Productivity by Liam Wood I know I haven't posted a lot of writing tips lately, and I hope to get back to that soon, but today I'd like to focus on my second favorite topic of conversation: productivity.  Writing is great, and all these techniques are useful and fun, but it's useless if you can't sit yourself in a chair and do something.  Productivity gets your story written.  Productivity dies when you get writer's block.  An enormous part of learning how to do art is learning how to be productive. My life has a lot of deadlines in weird places through the day.  I might spend six hours of the day out of the house, driving, meeting people, whatever needs to be done.  In all that time, I am physically unable to produce.  Those hours are black holes that devour the three-second flashes of inspiration that come with menial work.  I might be ready to write in the middle of the drive home, but when I get there, that urge is gone. Doesn't it make sense, then, to make the time at home extremely productive, and the time away my recharging time?  I'll think a bunch, talk to people, glean ideas from my surroundings, and come back ready.  But that means the time at home has to use that creative energy, or else it goes to waste.  I need to be productive when I have the opportunity, and allow myself to rest when I can't be productive. One cool thing about productivity is that it breeds productivity.  You've experienced it before.  You have an hour until you have to leave the house, and you haven't done any work yet.  You sit down, put your hands to the keyboard, start forcing words out, and suddenly you're flying along.  You look up and you have five minutes, but you've never typed faster.  If you had three more hours, you could get so much work done— but the deadline comes in the way.  Productivity breeds productivity. But it's hard, isn't it?  You get all your other tasks done first and clear your schedule so you can write, but when you sit down to work, you start procrastinating. Read more of this post