Craft of Writing: Timed Free Writing.

 Dear Reader,

I've moved the Craft of Writing segment to Mondays because the weekends are just too full of family business for me to find time to type much of anything up. The best I manage is a grocery list most weekends. I'm trying to carve out time to get other things going but it's not working so well. Preamble made, let's move on to the planned elements of this post.

Free writing is a big thing for me. Some people call it a 'brain dump' and use it as a time to put down all the things running around in their mind. Other people don't exactly have a name for it but they use free writing to lay the ground work of future projects and develop nuggets of gold that will be dropped into future stories. It's a combination of the two in my case.

It is pretty easy to get caught up in the process and lose about an hour of time to just rambling on the page. To prevent that, I bought myself a little sand timer. It's got bright pink sand in it (why not get the one with my favorite color in it, right?) and the time it runs for is ten minutes. I'm still getting the hang of writing out things like blog posts in ten minutes. My typing speed is slowly creeping up. So is the number of typos that I have to edit out. But, using the sand timer to keep me on task really helps.

I force myself to keep working as much as I may want to dive into a research rabbit hole to learn everything the internet has to offer about some obscure thing. It restricts how long I have to work and, as such, opens up time for me to get other writing projects done or at least making some headway on them. It also helps me get a bit more control over my schedule. Timed free writing is some days the easiest bit of timed writing. Other days, I feel like I should just write "I hate this." for the entire time limit because I can't think of anything. (Usually, those days, I'm not fully awake and am still on my first cup of coffee.)

On the whole, I highly recommend free writing as a tool to get ideas out on the page. And I really strongly encourage timed free writing (it doesn't have to be ten minutes) to help you focus on what you're working on and avoid losing time for other projects and responsibilities. After all, you don't want to be in the position I was last week when I wasn't using my timer and the kids were asking me when I was going to do the dishes. That was a little awkward.