This week, I’ll teach you how to continue writing while on holiday.
I took some much-needed time off & went to Italy last week. Vacations are, by definition, breaks in routine & responsibility. Novel experiences can offer new perspectives. Time away from duties can be restful.
Unfortunately, many people pause the good along with the bad.
Taking a week off your writing habit is enough to break it.
When building a habit, James Clear urges us not to skip 2 days in a row.
Skipping a week is a death sentence. Arbitrarily breaking habits undermines the very systems we’ve been building up. The momentum built towards your goal can be lost. After all, ‘we are what we do repeatedly.”
The key is to pause & alter your writing habit with intention:
1. Prepare & prewrite.
The worst writing to skip out on is deliverables.
The time I took off plotting my story structure is invisible to anyone but me. But if I missed a newsletter issue, I was violating a public commitment. This is enough of a forcing function for me to focus on it.
I wrote two weeks of newsletter content before taking my outbound flight.
Writing two issues in the time I usually take to write one was a good test of my capabilities.
Thanks to the time pressure, I wrote double my usual weekly content, of comparable quality. Does this mean I should always double my output? Hell no. But it tells me that I can write my usual content a lot faster & have more time for writing my actual novel.
Prewriting takes the pressure off & pushes you further.
2. Plan a reduced schedule.
Despite caring care of deliverables, you’re still trying to keep up a daily writing habit.
You need to be honest about the time & desire you’ll have on vacation. Instead of a sacred hour, just keep a sacred 10 minutes. Reduce your writing sessions in advance with intention.
I solve this by maintaining a bullet journal on the road with a page for each day.
3. Take an open mind & empty notebook.
One of the benefits of a vacation is accumulating experiences to write about.
Writing is usually a lonely, indoor hobby. Getting outside delays writing initially, but makes it easier once you get back to the desk. Keep your mind open to the word on vacation.
Focus on idea generation over content writing.
Have a reliable way to quickly capture notes while on the move. Once again, my bullet journal does the trick for me. You can use your phone if you wish.
Now, go take a vacation. Learn something new & tell us all about it when you’re back.
To get more help on your first novel:
Happy writing!
Workflow:
- Pick Theme
- Advice
- Update
- Pick from Ideas Note
- Clickable headline
- Skimmable outline
- Rough Draft
- Polished Draft (1:3:1)
- Hemingway Edit
- Review- next day, on mobile, out loud
- Queue on Medium (Tue)
- Queue on Substack (Tue)
- Insert Backlinks for Digital Garden
- Write Pre-CTA (Mon)
- Write Post-CTA (Fri)
- All scheduled?
Spokes:
Pre-CTA:
Maintaining your writing habit during vacation is hard.
It requires doing things differently to accomplish the same goals:
- Prewrite deliverables
- Write less but efficient
- Allow more time for idea generation
Tomorrow, I’ll show my subscribers how I did it while in Italy.
Join us here: https://ranbirsingh.substack.com
Post-CTA:
Routines are necessary.
Vacations are too.
Yet they contradict each other, especially for writers.
On Tuesday, my subscribers learned how I balance the two.
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