Posted on by seasonsshadow

A.M. to P.M. – The Best Time to Write

Recently, a friend told me he gets up and writes before work. This doesn’t sound too extraordinary as a standalone fact. But he works at 5:30 in the morning. Now, I don’t know about you, but doing anything requiring any modicum of concentration at 4AM is simply out of the question for me.

He told me he likes it when the world is quiet.

I made a sound of agreement, but I know the REASON the world is quiet at that time is because everyone is asleep. Including myself.

In the evenings, I write. I choose music I want to ignore and slip my headphones on. That way, I don’t care if the world is quiet or not. I’ve created my little sphere, and I work within it.

Which got me thinking. IS there a best time of the day to write?

There is NO best time to write, as long as you’re alert, consistent, and minimizing distractions.

A lot of posts and articles I read stated my friend and I fall into the two “best” times for writing. However, looking a little deeper into it, it’s not that simple. It’s related to your circadian rhythm.

A circadian rhythm is the mental, physical, and behavioural cycle a person goes through in a 24 hour period. It is influenced by when the sun rises and sets, temperature, stress levels, food intake, physical activity, and other outside factors. Within this rhythm, there are times of alertness and fatigue. These times of alertness are what we want to focus on.

Generally, one or two hours after you wake up, you experience a period of wakefulness and alertness. I personally do not experience this consistently/reliably. And let me tell you. If I woke up at 6AM just to see if I could wait out the groggies to get an hour of writing in… I would be a miserable person to deal with. Others who DO experience this alertness and wakefulness consistently/reliably would benefit from incorporating writing into their mornings.

For the standard 9 – 5, Monday to Friday, if you skip this morning writing period, your next obvious opportunity is after work. Moving straight from work to your WIP is not very effective for most, because your brain needs a “cool-down” or a “destress period” from the job. Then, of course, you have dinner and clean up, and whatever else you catch yourself up on, run your house, destress again, and then your next opportunity presents itself. Are you alert at 7PM? 8PM? 9PM? Great! Write then.

For the non-standard shift workers, it’s even harder to nail down a writing session to stick to. Rotating days off, swing shifts, clopens, and 12-hour shifts can all cause disruptions to any semblance of a schedule, so you have to essentially “game the system”. Instead of writing at a set time, it’s going to be more effective for you to write within a set part of your schedule.

For example.

Do you like to get up several hours before your shift so you can get stuff done? Work writing into the “before your shift” routine whether that’s at 4AM, 7AM, or 10AM. Alternately, are you the kind of person who rolls out of bed half awake for your shift and does most personal tasks afterwards, punting all your chores and errands to your days off? Work writing into the “before bed” routine you have, whether that’s at 9PM, 11PM, or 1AM.

Like I said. Whatever works with your schedule and your body. Just make it consistent. Make it a routine. Put your interests on the same level of importance as your personal hygiene. Sound radical? Sometimes that’s the mindset you need to force yourself into a new routine!

I also don’t want to hear a single person say “Ah yes, but the best time for me to write is a time with every distraction that has ever existed.” because you can get some really nice noise-cancelling headphones for $200. You can get normal headphones and some sweet thematic music for substantially less than that. You can get earplugs at the dollar store. Control your distractions wherever it is safe to do so, and get that writer-butt in there!

The only thing I saw toted as a strictly “bad time” to write is that horrible after-lunch slump. So don’t pick that time to schedule your writing session.

Alertness. Consistency. Having minimal distractions. You can do this!

Since your most productive writing time is linked to circadian rhythms and circadian rhythms are affected by the seasons, I wanted to touch quickly on whether or not there was a best season to write.

The season you’re least busy and most comfortable in? That’s the best season to write.

Lame. I know.

I always thought it would be summer and fall, but most of the articles I read said fall and winter. There were also a bunch of votes for spring. Consensus? Apparently, we don’t know her.

The trend I DID notice was that people who argued for fall being the best writing time cited things like being really busy in the summer and liking the cooler weather to sit at their computer or have their laptop. People who argued for the spring seemed to like that it was warming up and seemed to gain inspiration from the world starting to grow again. Winter had votes because you could be snuggly in your house and ignore the weather for as long as you wanted. There’s also not a lot of good reasons to go outside come, say, February. For summer being the best, people said things like enjoying writing on the dock at a lake all summer. In the sun. That sounds awful to me, personally.

Summer is the time when there’s the most daylight. This is important to me because I have trouble feeling motivated to do things when it’s dark outside. Summer is also the time for fun sugary drinks, shaded patios, and air conditioning. I don’t have kids, I don’t have classes or trips or anything to do in the summer so it’s not busy. Therefore, for me, summer is perfect for writing. Autumn is much the same. The mornings and evenings are nice and cool, the days are still warm, and I’m not busy here either. These are the two best times to write for me personally.

During the winter, I hate everything including myself. It’s cold. I’m dry. You’re dry. We make static electricity when we shake hands. The outside is cold, wet, cold and wet, or frozen. It’s hard to be covered in as many blankets as I want and also utilize my hands for things like typing. Spring, I tend to my garden and get the yard up and running. I’m quite busy! These are the seasons I don’t expect much creativity and writing from myself.

So! I am an evening writer who does her best work in summer and fall. How about you? What are your productive times and seasons?

References

Posted on by seasonsshadow

Is Your Setting a Mary Sue?

The online course I’m taking for video game writing has been talking a lot about worldbuilding. This is nice because it gives me plenty to think about in my job and hobbies. I’ve made several posts about this already, but today I’m going to get to the core of the issue: Prevent your setting from being the most boring character in your book. Or the most pretentious character in your book. Or the most hated character in your book.

“But Winters!” You say. “My setting is Lubbock, Texas!” (I googled ‘the most boring city in the world 2024’ and this is what it returned.)

That’s nice. If you don’t want it to come across as a cardboard cutout of Lubbock, you still need to build out your setting more than just a cursory description. Trust me, if you ask anyone who grew up in a place with “nothing to do”, you’ll get a lot of wild stories. Human beings MAKE their own fun. They MAKE their own activities. Even if those activities are drinking around a fire and accidentally creating ghostly snow-thrones making it look like a gathering of spectres. Then maybe the locals call that area the “hill of kings”. That sort of thing won’t make it into any articles you may grab for research purposes. Unless you’re reading someone’s blog and they mention it.

Please make your setting well-rounded, personable, and real. Draw the reader in.

The relationship between the protagonists and the setting should be just as important to you as a writer as the relationship between characters is. Let the characters and setting interact. Let them influence each other. Let them work together.

Make it so that the reader wants to explore the setting through the eyes of the characters. Your story world should feel like more than the backdrop in a stage play, where the stagehands are throwing in only what’s necessary to the story.

Unless it’s instead, like one of those kindergarten plays where some kid lays on stage and plays grass.

That has its own problems.

Overcrowding your setting and building it out unnecessarily can be frustrating for its own reasons, like making your reader suffer through pages of purple prose.

Purple prose is a trope where you use flowery language and an abundance of adjectives. The descriptions are redundant and often describe things that won’t come up again. I’m sure we can all remember reading a page and a half describing someone’s sandwich (or other mundane object) which ultimately, doesn’t matter. Even if the sandwich is important to the plot, it does NOT need a page and a half. I promise.

When you’re writing, there are things you will know about your setting that the reader will never know. Just like there are things about your characters you will know that will never come up to the reader. These things are still important, but they are more for shaping the characters and setting as their own entity than to info-dump on the reader.

Just like no one wants to read a page and a half about a sandwich, no one wants to read that stereotypical introduction where a character looks in the mirror and describes themselves from head to toe. It’s juvenile at best, and at worst, off-putting. Unless your goal is to make it into a Men Writing Women or Women Writing Men subreddit, skip it. Or find another way to convey the information.

Treat your setting like a character. Appraise its personality and the way it presents to the reader. Give it more substance than just existing and looking pretty. Give it a history. Give it some significant lifetime events. Give it preferences, vibes, and presence! Make it feel real to yourself. Make it feel real to the reader without telling them every little tidbit.

Let your audience want to discover the setting just as much as they want to get to know your characters. Nothing commits people to a book or a series more than curiosity. Every piece you make them curious about is another piece that will make them come back to your work.

References

Posted on by seasonsshadow

Change Paragraphs Every Time You SPIT

Have you heard the “Tip Top” trick for knowing when to break paragraphs? Create new paragraphs each time you change – TIme, Place, TOpic, Person.

TIme – Make a new paragraph any time that you are skipping either forward or backward in time.

Place – Make a new paragraph any time that you are moving to a new place. If your piece was a film, this would be a transition. If your piece was a play, this would be a set change.

TOpic – Any new topics, ideas, or subjects need to have their time to shine and grab the reader’s attention. Do this by introducing them in their own paragraph.

Person – When you are writing in an omnipotent point of view and change focus to a different person change paragraphs. When a new person is speaking, new paragraph. When you are introducing a new character then guess what? New paragraph.

I have one I like a little better than that.

Change paragraphs every time you SPIT.

Or, for a catchier/morally questionable option –

SPLIT WHERE YOU SPIT.

S – Speaker

You HAVE to break paragraphs each time a new speaker takes the spotlight, or every time the speaker changes within a dialogue. I know this is a modern rule but it was implemented for clarity. Dante did not follow this rule. I never knew if he or Virgil were speaking in the Divine Comedy. I would punch Dante if I had that power. It’s hard to follow and in modern writings can stall the flow of the text.

P – Place

Please change a paragraph when the focus of your narrative moves to a different place. Place is not just geographical. It can also be emotional or a state of mind, if you care to debate philosophy. This point is nearly identical to the one in TIP TOP. If your piece was a film, a new paragraph would happen every time there was a scene transition. If your piece was a play, a new paragraph would happen every time you struck the stage. When I refer to the emotional place or state of mind, I have found that it can be helpful to really accent and emphasize that change or difference between the two states when you break.

I – Introduce

“Introduce” is kind of my cheater point. If you are introducing a speaker, a place, a state of mind etc you likely already have made the necessary paragraph breaks. Consider this though, I needed a vowel to make my acronym work.

Okay but on a more serious note, I wanted a catch all for introducing new ideas, new plot points, new non-speaking characters, and anything else that you would care to bring into your work in progress. “Introduce” is a fairly good way to emphasize that everything in your writing, if it is worth mentioning, is worth a proper introduction and should be relevant to your work. If you are struggling to give the element its own paragraph, consider if it is really necessary or if there is a way to acknowledge it in an alternate way.

T – Time

This point is the same as the one in TIP TOP. Any time you are moving either forwards or backwards in time, you should be creating a new paragraph. If nothing else, the new paragraph will force your reader to pause which can create enough mental space for you to ease your reader into the alternate time stream.

I used a couple of references to help me lay out the above thoughts.

I would love to hear thoughts on the above, or what other writers (regardless of genre) have found helpful in their paragraph splitting journeys!