Daphne Gray-Grant has a great piece on Ragan, a site for professional communicators (read: PR hacks), about the kinds of things writers do to get the job done. I especially like #6, as procrastination is the hurdle I’ve had to deal with most often as a writing instructor and coach:
Write in small bursts. Creative work doesn’t require oodles of time. That first draft you need to write? It’s best done in dribs and drabs, a little bit at a time. Instead of procrastinating, effective writers persuade themselves to write a little each day, no matter how frazzled and frantic they feel. (Editing, on the other hand, usually needs space, time and quiet.)
About a dozen years ago, when I was writing a novel amidst three more-or-less full time jobs (including a technical writing gig for Broderbund software that bored me to tears), I adopted the motto “a sentence a day, even if it kills me.” The novel–and the software manuals–got done.
She also suggests separating writing from editing (great advice that I have a hard time following, a bad habit I freely admit slows me down), doing research before writing (again, great advice, though I’ve seen this abusued, as doing research sometimes becomes the excuse for not writing), and “dissecting” great writing “like a scientist” to see how it’s done.
