Author Crush Month: Lauraine Snelling

My very first writers conference was a gift from my friend Janet. She didn’t want to go to her first writers conference alone. Together with our also-first-timer friend Lisa, the three of us sat in on a five-day workshop for fiction writers, all of us trying to believe we weren’t scared to death. But as soon as Lauraine Snelling started to speak, we started to relax. She encouraged us, she hugged us, she told us we were wonderful, and she believed with all her heart that God had us all there in that workshop for a reason. Over the years, Lauraine became a mentor to me, and then a dear friend. She writes with passion and heart about the kind of people you can imagine are real, people with flaws but good hearts… people like you and me. If you haven’t read her books yet, give one a try. And I hope you find encouragement as you read about Lauraine’s writing routines… or lack thereof.

Available April 2010

Ever since I was a kid, which is some years ago now, I rebelled against the idea of routines. Things like do your homework right when you get home from school. I don’t think so, riding my horse was not to be done after dark and homework could be. As I grew older, got married and had children, I was locked into more routines than I cared for but when someone told me about a card file to organize housework, I took off running—away. You see routines come easily to organized people and those of us born without that gene, have trouble.

Enter writing when my three kids were teenagers. Even at that first writer’s conference, I heard about organizing your work, organizing your life to find time for writing, organize your children to take over some of the household chores so you have time to write. Well, my kids were already pulling their share so that wasn’t such a big deal, but a chart on the fridge with chores listed and points or stars or money added and subtracted, well, let’s just say not one ever cluttered our fridge door.

So now I’ve been writing for thirty years come April. That really looks scary written down. I am one of the old timers, that’s even scarier. Kitty asked me to blog about routines—and she knows me well enough to know this is part of a joke. You see, she was born organized, like our younger son, and she comes up with wonderful charts and graphs and systems. People like me are truly blessed by people like her. And I know there are a lot of people like me. So basically this blog is for you, the not naturally organized. Or routinized. Red line says that’s not a word but to me it is so it stays.

I have learned that at least some kind of routine will help me be better organized and build effective routines. Hope that makes sense. I have the good fortune to have contracts back to back which is wonderful but that also means, you guessed it, deadlines, routines, organizational efforts. The problem with deadlines is that if you miss one, you mess up the others. Domino effect. So I have spent the better part of the last years being behind, sometimes worse than others.

My word of wisdom for you is, being behind is a killer. A killer of creativity, a killer of joy, a killer of your word and self esteem and after awhile, it damages your body. So I beg of you, don’t let it happen to you.

Available now

Now then, before you figure your routine, you have to figure out when you work best, what hours for you are most productive writing time. I am NOT a lark who rises up singing before the dawn. I used to be a night owl and that’s when I did my best writing, between ten and two, as in a.m. That has changed through the years and now I agree with the concept that I am a swing shift person. My best writing hours are between eleven a.m. and three, then back at it in the evening for an hour or so, like eight to nine. I write fast then, most of the time, not pulling words out one by one. This is not an easy time to keep out the world, late night was much easier but I am resigned to the fact that this is what works best for me. I know, I have the privilege of setting my own hours. But pardon the cliché, where there is a will, or necessity, there is a way.

So that’s first, work during your most productive time.

I’ve had a couple of years that pretty much messed up any routine or creativity, but that is now past and one of the things I had to do, was go back to see what worked best when I was writing. So that is step number two. Look at your years of writing and what worked best for you, not just well, but best. If you are a new writer, watch yourself to learn what works best.

I am a strong proponent about do not edit until the end of the novel, so you write the first draft as fast as you can. Stopping to edit wrecks the flow and the pacing and your joy in writing. I know some of you would argue with that, but this is my blog. You get to write your own. I also know that ten to twelve pages a day, with some spurts of more, are not only possible but probable for me with this routine. And the thing that is so hard to admit, I do so much better when I do this. Arggg. Sorry, I relapsed. So I outline my story, a rough outline and begin with chapter one, writing as fast as I can. At the end of the writing time, I make a list of the things that I know have to come next to get me from A to B, either on a separate pad or paper on a clipboard, or lately right at the bottom of what I’ve written. That’s it for the day.

When I open the file the next morning, I read through what I wrote the day before, not the entire ms., fill in whatever places I left blank, change a few words, make notes if this prompts a change for earlier chapters and read through the outline for the day. I start writing and go as hard as I can until…you get the picture. I do not look for words either online or a thesaurus or anything else while writing. I do not look up facts, like what color were her eyes? I write. Those things I can look up off writing hours. I make notes for research needed and do that on off hours too. Usually I do that at the end of the book but I am getting better at research online.

If I do this five or six days a week, I am about two thirds of the way through the book by the end of the month. This is utopia. When I get a week away, I can get a hundred pages done, so a couple of times a year, I am blessed to have other writers to run away with.

We have a Motor Coach and love to travel. Last year that cost me a lot of writing time because I was having trouble focusing due to travel and health stuff. Today I am writing while Wayne is driving and this works when we are in an area I know well. When in new country, I want to see the scenery too. But I am back in the groove so we’ll see how this goes. I have to get started on the next book too.

Two classic quotes that I use often to get myself going. Yoda from Star Wars. “Try, there is no try. There is do or do not. There is no try.” And the second, the Nike slogan. “Just do it.” It is easier to just do it, if the doing has become a habit. Routines are part of habits.

I am, besides a recovering procrastinator, an all or nothing person. Not good thinking. Another friend that God dropped into my life convinced me that anything is better than nothing. Another phrase of hers and others, “do the next right thing.” That could be altered to “the next write thing.” Because of her counsel and prayer I have learned to be grateful with two pages a day or sometimes five, rather than ten or nothing. This is keeping me from throwing the whole thing over and escaping into the pages of a good book and the refrigerator.

A hint I have for all of us. Email, Twitter and Facebook are not part of writing time. Pages in the book are writing time. Yes, they are writing related, often enough but not writing time. I have one other suggestion. If you need something to transverse from life time to writing time, find something that works well for you. Some suggestions: morning pages that can be done any time of the day, a letter, a journal entry, or even ONE game of Free Cell or Solitaire. Choose according to your needs and self control.

May you all be blessed with writing and life routines that work and bring you closer to those goals you have written down. Oops, that’s another routine. Think DAILY. That’s a marvelous word. And may all your goals come true.

Today Lauraine Snelling is a member of the More Than Two Million Books in Print club, but when she first began she was a mother of three teenagers with a simple dream to write “horse books for kids.” Her dreams manifested into reality in 1982 with Tragedy on the Toutle, a story about a girl and her horse caught in the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. All told, Lauraine now has over 50 books published. Helping others reach their writing dream is the reason Lauraine teaches at writer’s conferences across the country. Her latest release is A Measure of Mercy, and No Distance Too Far comes out in April.