Spring Cleaning For Your Writing Routine

Ah, springtime, a time of renewal and refreshment. So while you’re hitting those closets hard with spring cleaning, how about shaking up your writing routine?

If your writing routine has gathered dust from disuse, or it’s become drab and dreary from repetition, here are some things I do to refresh my routine and get those new ideas flowing. 

Listen to writing podcasts. My favorite writing podcast that I tune into regularly is “Writing Excuses”. It’s only 15 minutes long so it’s easy to fit into your day, and the authors that host it have great ideas and suggestions for almost any writing topic or issue that you’re interested in. Plus, they’re usually pretty entertaining.

Read about writing. There are a lot of great books and blogs out there that can energize your writing muscles. Some recent books that I’ve enjoyed are Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders by Susanne Alleyn and Writing Fiction For Dummies by Peter Economy and Randy Ingermanson. (Yes, I’m serious! It was actually a fun, broad overview of the fiction writing process.) I also enjoyed Jerry Jenkins’ blog post, “8 Steps to Writing a Perfect Scene—Every Time”.

Write differently. This can be trying a new genre that you usually don’t write in, using a different story format (flash fiction, novel, novella, etc.) or even changing the font you usually type in. (I kid you not, I changed my font to Comic Sans when I write my drafts now and it rocked my world. Something about it being silly allows you to write more freely without having to worry about the final product yet.)