How to Increase Writing Productivity

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One reason I've really enjoyed The Biggest Loser is because I'm part of a team and I've made a commitment to show up. Nothing too remarkable about that while you have it and it's working for you. A really big deal, though, when you don't have it and you need it.

So somebody challenged me to use those same principles in my novel writing. Get a team going and make sure that I show up. Believe it or not, I've figured out a way.

Here's how it works: you probably forgot (and maybe I never wrote about) my accountability partner, a freelance writer who lives in the country in circumstances similar to mine out in Oklahoma. For two years this coming January, she and I have e-mailed each other every morning with our plans and goals for the workday, primarily to hold each other accountable in our fiction writing. We've only spoken twice and have never met, yet we know almost everything about each other and have become close friends. I think she has seen my photo but I've never seen hers. 

So we've tried a daring experiment. We have an appointed time every morning, which we call our Sacred Time, when we show up at our desks and do nothing but write fiction. Together. Usually with our cats. Except we've entered a strange new level: we have Skype video calls going while we writ. Yes, she can see me working and I can see her working, and nobody better get up from that chair until our two hours are over. (Though sometimes we have to excuse ourselves to let the cats in and out. That's the only allowed excuse. That and answering the door for people bringing checks, which has only happened once and unfortunately it wasn't for me.)

It felt very awkward at first. We don't talk to each other, we e-mail. So we didn't really know how to carry on a conversation, made worse by the fact that talking on Skype is like talking on a walkie-talkie. We've almost started to end our sentences with radio jargon so the other person will know it's okay to talk, but we don't know radio jargon.

I no longer feel like I'm here working by myself (unless you count the cat). Somebody notices if I goof off or my butt doesn't stay in chair, and I'm really enjoying the silent companionship. At the end of the session we tell how many words we have written and whether it was easy or hard.

Sometimes we'll follow up with an e-mail, which is useful because we now use our regular e-mails to each other as ways to answer our own questions by writing them down. I've learned so much from her and rely on her to help prop me up when I need propping, and I hope I do the same for her.

Comments

[lori]

this is great, sounds like, for you both!

[groovyoldlady]

Cool! However, I've talked to someone on Skype. It totally weirds me out. I keep talking to the camera instead of the microphone. And then those long strange sound lags. Ugh!

perhaps it's better that you don't actually talk!