Angela Booth's Writing Blog: Five tips for writing productively: up your word count today

If you're not as productive a writer as you'd like to be, there are two main reasons: you're not compartmentalizing, and you lack processes.

The ability to compartmentalize is a must-have skill for a writer, and you can develop it easily enough.

With regard to processes, "How do you write?" is a writer's most-asked question; it comes a close second to "where do you get your ideas?" Writers are always looking for new processes they can try, and this is a big clue to writing productively - your processes change over time, and you can upgrade your processes as often as you upgrade your computer.

So let's look at my top five tips for writing productively:

1. When you're writing, write. Writing is not research, or reading, it's writing - getting words onto the page or the computer screen.

Your imagination will help you to compartmentalize your mind so you can write when you sit down to write. It's a matter of habit.

To form the habit, set time limits: write for just five minutes a day. If that works for you without resistance arising, aim for ten minutes, then 20 minutes and finally half an hour a day.

To help you to look forward to writing at your writing "sessions", imagine yourself writing and enjoying it before you get up in the morning, and as you fall asleep at night... just imagine yourself at the computer writing and having fun.

Your imagination is powerful, but it's a two-edged sword. If you're not writing productively, your imagination is stopping you. Take control of it.

2. Lower your expectations.

When you sit down to write, just write. Until you get the habit of compartmentalizing so that writing is something you do as automatically as you tie your shoelaces, demanding of yourself that you write to some subjective standard is irrational - writers are terrible judges of their own writing.

Just be pleased that you're writing. You can fix what you've written afterwards.

At this stage, you're training yourself to compartmentalize - and this is a skill that's highly valuable, but it's not acquired overnight.

3. Separate writing from editing.

When you're writing, stop fussing with word choices, transitions and sentence structure. This is all is part of the revision/ editing process, which comes after you've written a couple of drafts.

Editing has no part in the creation part of the writing process at all. If you're fiddling around searching for le mot juste you're wasting prime writing time. Get over this pernicious habit.

4. When you've got the writing habit - you can compartmentalize, so you can sit down and write anywhere - develop discipline.

"Discipline" has gone out of fashion. However, you'll need to develop discipline in some form if you want to be as productive a writer as you could be, if you had discipline. :-)

I won't say any more about discipline here, because developing discipline comes AFTER you get in the habit of writing every day, and you're enjoying it. Trying to develop discipline before you develop a writing habit is useless and cruel - it's like smacking a puppy because he won't walk on a leash before you've trained him to do it.

5. Consider the tools you use to write.

When I switched to a Mac in 2005, I became more productive and more creative. Your mileage may vary. :-) Writing on a Mac also made writing more fun for me.

I'm not urging you to switch to a Mac, although it couldn't hurt, but what I am asking you to do is to consider how your tools affect your writing.

If a tool makes writing fun (or you think it will), then get the tool - it's worth it.

Being willing to experiment with new tools, and buying software and books which help you to write more productively is an investment in yourself as a writer. As the ad says, you're worth it. :-)