Focusing Your Thoughts

Once the idea has cemented itself in your brain that you are going to write a book, then what?  Do the words spill out of your head onto the pages effortlessly?  (You might want to see a doctor if something is spilling out of your head.)  Does the plot come packaged and ready to go, complete with subplots, character development, backstory, climax, and resolution?  All you have to do is lock yourself in your room for two days and you walk out with a completed manuscript?

I doubt it.  Most of us don't have it that easy.  What we usually have are snippets of the story that we try to write during the snippets of our day that we can spend writing.

As a stay at home mom, I have about two hours a day when I can work on my writing.  That precious time is called nap time.  Once I sit down and have taken a few deep breaths to focus myself, I get to work.  I had a problem though: I couldn't get my thoughts off the list of daily tasks and on to creative, irresponsible thinking.  For a while, the time I spent "working" on my book was actually spent staring at the last sentence I'd written months ago.

I knew I wasn't going to get anywhere at that pace.  So, after one of the above described wasted periods of time, I decided to try to focus on my book during other times of the day.  Pushing around my vacuum, I thought of where my current plot point was going.  As I folded the laundry, I thought about my antagonist's motivations.  While driving around doing errands, I brainstormed about the climax of my work in progress.  And when naptime came the next day, I knew exactly what to write.  I got more done in that writing session than I had in months.  So I tried it again.  Trotting (it can't really be called running) on the treadmill at the gym, I thought about how the secondary characters wove into the protagonist's development.  Washing the dishes, I worked through an idea I loved, but didn't really fit in with the rest of the novel.  And then I sat down and wrote.

It's amazing.  I finally know what works for me.  Instead of letting my mind wander aimlessly while engaged in mundane tasks, I try to control my thoughts and put them to work.  Even though I can't sit down and write for hours, I have the outlines of work ready to be written when sleep gives me the break I need to write.  The more I focus my thoughts on my book, the more progress I make, the better my ideas develop, and the more motivated I become.

So, try it.  Focus your thoughts on your work in progress while you're doing things that don't require all of your brain power.  Hopefully you will find that you get more done and you get to see your whole story come together.  And that's exciting.