Sustainable Writing Rountines (Live Panel Discussion from October 2023)

In the lead-up to NaNoWriMo 2024, we hosted a live discussion panel to talk about building sustainable routines. The panel was made up of a variety of writers, include established published writers, professional editors, and ML volunteers from around the world.

This post is just a summary of some of the key ideas and concepts that were mentioned to help build sustainable writing routines.

Be warned that this is a long post.

What is NaNoWriMo?

For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is really an international event (not national). Every year in November, writers from around the world chose to dedicate themselves to their writing craft. The event is open to anyone and is free to join—which is why so many writers do it.

Traditionally, the NaNoWriMo goal is to write 50,000 words during the month of November on a new novel. It's only 1667 words a day, but that "only" word is something that can be scary to a lot of writers. And many writers are quickly overwhelmed by the undertaking.

Every year, without fail, many writers give up because they had thrown everything they had into this venture, forgetting that life has a habit of happening. This is why sustainable routines are vital to this process, because without a sustainable structure to your day, those life events will take over.

Meet the Panelists

Our discussion panel was made up of six members.

K T Bowes (Katie Bee on the Canterbury Writers Discord server) is a romance writer who has been publishing her novels since 2013. While she is a mother of four, all of her children have spread their wings and have flown from the nest. For Katie, her writing is her livelihood, but she admits that she's struggling to make ends meet on her writing alone. But she hasn't let that deter her. For Katie, routine is important. She's autistic, and her autistic nature gets really cranky if something disrupts her routine. You can find out more about Katie and her books on her website: ktbowes.com

Kathy Swailes (Kathy S. on Discord) is a professional copyeditor. In a former life, she was a personal trainer and ran her own gym. In a life before that, she was a scientist. But now, she's finally working on her first novel and exploring her writer-side. Even though Kathy is retired from her professional editing, something keeps pulling her back in again. Perhaps it's her love of words. You can reach Kathy through her website at writeorwrong.co.nz

Bri Thompson (B. with a colorful pumpkin picture on Discord) is one of the Municipal Liaisons (MLs) for Fayetteville, North Carolina, USA. Bri has been writing since she was very young, with her roots starting in fanfiction. She writes YA and new adult fantasy and is hoping to work towards publication come 2024. Bri is visually impaired, but she doesn't let that stop her from writing. In fact, this disability allows her to see the world in a way that is best explored in her imaginative worlds. But it's her manic waves and other mental disorders that make building a sustainable routine the hardest, because if life didn't get in the way, she would write all day, every day… and forget to eat or sleep. And it's the housework that would suffer the most. (We'll get to why she says housework is always color coded as gray in her world.)

Ellice Gullet (Ellice#711 on Discord) is also an ML from Fayetteville, North Carolina, USA. But writing is such a tiny part of her life. Ellice is a 5th grade teacher and a mother of three, enjoying the chaos that mom's taxi creates for the first time. It doesn't help that all of her children are "talented and popular." So, building a routine for her writing that works around her chaotic family life and work schedule is a must, or she would never get any writing done.

And our final panelist (and moderator) was Judy L Mohr (JudyLMohr on Discord). Judy is a professional developmental editor and writing coach, and she is also the ML for Christchurch, New Zealand and New Zealand Elsewhere. She is a self-professed overachiever, and it's only the routines that help her get out of bed at times. You can find out more about Judy through her website at judylmohr.com

Routines and Mental Health

When we started the live session, Bri was doing her best to not have an anxiety attack, but this was in part why we wanted to chat with her. Bri admits that building a routine when you have the range of mental health issues that she does is always a balancing act, and sometimes her brain has other ideas.

The best piece of advice that Bri had for anyone with mental health issue is to not force your brain to do something that it's not interested in. That's the quickest recipe for disaster. This is why Bri always has multiple projects on the go. She swaps between her various projects frequently, because that's what her brain wants to do.

But Bri, at the moment, is suffering from what she called her manic phase, where she has become totally obsessed with writing fanfiction. And she can't stop writing. It's pouring out of her faster than she can keep up. And sometimes she has to use a dictation app on her phone to service this manic mode.

But to help with her general scheduling and time management—so writing doesn't consume her life—Bri uses what she calls a Kanban board. It's where she generates a list of tasks (all color coded) of things that need to get done and the things that she wants to get done. It's a bit like a To Do list, but it's more than that, because it's also a way of prioritizing those tasks. And she color codes the tasks based on the type of task that they are. Her writing is given the color blue. Her fanfic themes are in green, because they are bright and fun. Personal goals (her favorite goals) are given her favorite color of purple. And housework is color coded with gray (and during our panel discussion, she admitted that was because she finds housework dark and dreary… but who doesn't, right?).

To help with her focus and building a sustainable routine that remembers to include life and those around her, Bri treats her writing as the reward for doing the things that she doesn't want to do. And this is where her Kanban boards come into play, because she can see what needs to be done and what she can ignore.

To find out more about how Bri builds her Kanban board, visit: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sf_AyR1fh0

Time of Day Matters

Many of us on the panel recognized early on in our careers that we needed to structure our days so we can make the most of when we feel the most creative. While Katie and Judy are morning people, spending as much time in the early mornings writing, Kathy is an afternoon/evening person.

Kathy has found that she struggles to get creative and intensely focused in the mornings, so she tries to make all of her appointments that require her to be away from her computer for the mornings. That way, come the afternoons, it's the appointments with herself that take priority.

Recently, Katie was taking an online course on Amazon Ads, and because of time zone issues, all the sessions were in the mornings… which really wasn't working for her. She was able to do the course work, but that disruption to her morning writing sessions was putting her off-kilter for the remainder of the day. Now that the course is over, she's back to writing at the time that works best for her.

Associate Writing With Other Things

We talked about habit stacking and subliminal associations.

Habit stacking is where you add a new habit that you want to adopt to an already established routine or sequence of habits. The example that was used to help explain this was the habit building that we use to teach children to brush their teeth as part of their nighttime routines. But the habit stacking idea works well for writers.

For Katie, this is seen as her morning ritual. It's workout on the trainer, then head down the hall to her office, where her husband has already set the incense going, has her coffee waiting for her on her warmer pad, and her electronics are all lined up and turned on, ready to go. She might be thinking that she might do something else, but she smells that incense, and it pulls her to her writing.

While this is partly habit stacking, it is also known as subliminal associations, where you associate one action with another. That smell triggers the writer brain in Katie.

And Judy has subliminal associations too. She recognized some time ago that she was fueled by the sunrise. If she didn't get to see that sunrise from her office window, she would struggle for the rest of the day. And there is something about her morning chai latte. She needs that chai to jump-start her work-mode brain.

Think About Your Stories While Doing Other Things

Ellice is probably one of the busiest people on the panel: mom's taxi for 3 kids, full-time teacher, housework, dinner, ML for her region, and sometimes writing just doesn't happen. But whenever she's driving from one side of the county to the other, or when she's waiting for whatever chaos to ensue, she's constantly thinking about her writing.

She's thinking about that story and the next scene, writing it in her head… and rewriting it hundreds of times. Every line of dialogue. The setting. The action.

And when she has that scheduled hour of writing, she opens her favorite writing program and she's off, instantly writing with no warm-up time. It's because she's already planned that scene out and knows exactly how it has to go. All she has to do is get it on the page.

Reading Previous Sections Helps

While Ellice doesn't read over what she wrote previously, she doesn't need to. But Katie, Kathy, and Judy do.

By reading over the previously written section (limiting to say a few paragraphs or the previous page), you're able to slip back into the heads of your characters and get into the scene again.

But there is a temptation that this could turn into a full-blown editing session. The tactics employed to avoid this temptation varied among the panelists.

Judy and Kathy will allow themselves to do some editing, but they are also both professional editors and they can't help themselves. But Katie knows that she has deadlines to meet, thanks to her Patreon subscribers wanting to read new chapters every week.

But the biggest tip that they all had was that you had to give yourself permission to break your own rules, because sometimes, that was what the situation required.

The Lightbulb Moment for Judy L Mohr

Judy is always telling others that they have the ability to do this writing thing. And she knows that she has the writing ability too. But for some reason, the writer's block is a beast that often gets in Judy's way.

But there was something that Katie said that was a lightbulb moment for Judy. (And it wasn't anything new… it was just the way Katie said it.)

Katie finishes her writing day knowing that she has taken the story as far as she could for that day. She "can't see past the headlights." But come the new day, Katie knows that she'll be able to see the road again. She might be heading down the hall to her office with no idea where her story is heading, but she has faith that when she gets to her computer, the story will happen.

It was the "have faith" part that seemed to have changed things for Judy since the live session.

If you have faith that the writing will happen, you're not setting up a negative barrier that doubt can create. You're not doubting yourself or in your abilities. You're believing that you know what to do.

(And since our live session, this "have faith" attitude has allowed Judy to properly switch off her editor brain and just enjoy a new story. Her new novel is finding the page with the same joy and speed that she had when she was new to writing and didn't know how the editor brain worked.)

There were so many ideas that were bounced back and forth. (And Judy forgot to take notes of all the wonderful ideas.)

If you would like to reach out to any of our panelist to ask more questions about how they manage their writing routines, please reach out to us here at Canterbury Writers, and we'll put you in touch with our panelists.