Category Archives: Writing Tip

Writing Through the Storm: Maintaining a Writing Practice with Chronic Illness

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Photo by Marcus Aurelius

Maintaining a satisfying writing practice requires focus, energy, and consistency—qualities that chronic illness often disrupts. But, with the right strategies and perspectives, it’s possible to honor your impulse to write while tending to your body’s needs.

I can speak to this from personal experience because I live with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), so I’m no stranger to the potential tough days that hover on the periphery of my life, my writing practice, and my business every single day, like a bully waiting to have a go at my weak spots. 

While I can’t say that I’ve found a magic solution—at least not yet—here are some strategies and perspectives to help you navigate the unpredictable nature of chronic illness while still honoring your writing practice.

1. Redefine Productivity

Having a chronic illness will force you to adjust your expectations—about your own abilities, about other people’s expectations of you, and about what “productive” looks like for you. Writing every day for hours—or every day, period—may not be realistic, and that’s okay. Instead, focus on what you can do. Whether it’s writing for 5-15 minutes each day, writing for a couple of hours one day each week, or simply jotting down ideas when they come to you, every effort counts. Remember, progress doesn’t have to be linear.

2. Create a Flexible Routine

Rigid schedules often don’t work well when dealing with the symptoms or flare-ups of chronic illness. Instead, build a flexible routine. Leave more open space in your calendar to allow for those “surprises.” Slow down the pace of your life, in general. Identify the times of day when you feel most energetic and aim to write during those windows. On tougher days, give yourself permission to shift to less demanding creative tasks, like brainstorming, researching, or reading for inspiration. And rest. Sometimes it’s best to simply rest.

3. Set Tiny, Achievable Goals

When you’re managing limited energy and avoiding triggers, big goals can feel overwhelming. And not meeting them can be demoralizing. Best approach: Put that big goal on your calendar, way out into the future. Then, break it down into small, manageable steps, and put those on your calendar, too. For example, set smaller breadcrumb goals, like 100 words, one scene or outline, or one dialogue exchange. Reaching and acknowledging those smaller goals that rest within the larger ones will send dopamine cascading through your lovely brain, which will provide you the motivation to keep going.

4. Manage Your Environment

For people with chronic illness, environmental triggers like certain foods, fragrances, or temperature changes can impact health and energy levels. Create a writing space that minimizes these risks. If you need to, get an air purifier, use hypoallergenic materials, and a stash of safe, healthy, non-reactive snacks and drinks to keep your energy up while writing. Do this, at the very least, in your writing space, and preferably throughout your entire home. If you live with other people, ask for what you need from them. 

5. Use Tools and Technology

Assistive tools can make writing more accessible. If you’re having a low day but feel you have the energy and wherewithal to accomplish small tasks, speak your thoughts and words instead of typing or writing by hand. Writing apps like Scrivener or Evernote can help you organize ideas efficiently, or use the Voice Memos on your phone to get random thoughts and ideas about a scene, chapter, or character in one place so you can refer to them later. If brain fog is a challenge, try using templates or prompts to find your way in. Writing can look many ways.

6. Embrace the Power of Rest

Rest isn’t just a break from writing; it’s an important and essential part of the creative process. (That’s why I offer the Do Nothing Challenge!) Pushing through exhaustion often leads to burnout or worsening symptoms. Instead, listen to your body and give it the care it needs. Resting mindfully, daydreaming, soaking in an epsom salts bath, or applying ice packs can get you through rough spots to rejuvenate your energy and spark new ideas. Resting is an aspect of your writing life.

7. Build a Support System

If you don’t know other writers who understand the challenges of chronic illness (and bonus if you do!), look for groups that specialize in connecting people with chronic illness for encouragement and empathy. Sharing your experiences with others can make life feel a lot less isolating and lonely. You might be surprised how many writers you can find who also live with chronic illness—both are highly sensitive.

8. Work with Your Medical Team

If you’re managing a chronic illness and you have a solid medical team, they can be a big help by offering guidance on managing energy levels, avoiding flares, and maintaining concentration. Sometimes, adjustments to treatment plans can improve your ability to focus on creative work. Interestingly, a fair amount of doctors write fiction on the side, so if you have one or can find one, they’ll understand why your writing matters to you.

9. Practice Self-Compassion

It’s easy to feel frustrated when illness interrupts your writing, and during those times when you’re struggling to find you way back, guilt can set in. Remember that you’re doing the best you can under challenging circumstances. Be kind to yourself, and acknowledge the resilience it takes to keep creating despite the hurdles. Honoring your impulse to write is an act of self-love. So is showing yourself compassion and grace.

10. Celebrate Every Accomplishment

No matter how small, every word written is a reason to celebrate. Whether it’s finishing a paragraph, re-reading what you wrote last, or simply making a note about where you’ll pick up when you’re feeling better, tracking your efforts will keep you involved. Maintain a notebook or digital file to log your accomplishments, or as mentioned in #3 above, schedule them on a calendar. Then, treat yourself to something nice and/or fun, depending on the accomplishment and your budget, of course. You’ll get a double hit of dopamine—from finishing the task, followed by the enjoyment of your reward. Over time, these wins will remind you of your strength and progress, and each one will propel you on to the next.

Final Thoughts

Living with a chronic illness doesn’t mean you have to give up on your writing dreams. It means finding new ways to approach them, and being kind to yourself in the process. By adapting your practice to fit your health and working within your unique limitations, you can keep your creative spirit alive and thriving. Remember, your unique perspective as someone who navigates these challenges brings depth and authenticity to your writing. And that’s what the world needs.

Keep writing, even if it’s one word at a time. Because as Margaret Atwood once said, “A word after a word after a word is power.” 

You are a writer, no matter the pace.

Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

10 Self-Care Tips for Writers Exploring Complicated Characters and Difficult/Taboo Subject Matter

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Photo by MART PRODUCTION: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-black-leather-jacket-sitting-on-brown-wooden-floor-7277896/

Conceiving and developing characters is more taxing on a wrier than many realize.

To render a protagonist and her story believable—to create emotional verisimilitude—writers must be able to do the dance between objectivity and subjectivity. 

To be objective, you must step outside the character to observe them from all angles, and from the inside and out to perform a kind of detached “reporting” to the reader.

To explain. To summarize. To tell. 

To be subjective, you must climb inside the character and roam around through clandestine caverns of their heart, mind, and soul, to live in their skin and render them believable as a living, breathing human being who steps off the page and into readers’ hearts and minds.

To leave an impression. To invoke pathos. To show.

This process can be simultaneously harrowing and debilitating, fulfilling and transforming.

The emotional impact of being a writer is something many don’t discuss.

It’s something non-writers don’t or can’t comprehend. It’s something beginning writers don’t expect, which can become a great obstacle for many.

To write and tell universal stories that resonate in the hearts of your readers,
you must be willing to feel deeply. 

So, it’s important to have self-care practices in place.

Use these tips to help you navigate the emotional experience of living a writing life. 

Set Emotional Limits for Each Session
Decide in advance how deeply you’re willing to delve into intense scenes. Use timers or word count goals to create a natural stopping point before you feel emotionally drained. 

Create a Transition Ritual
After writing challenging scenes and material, establish a ritual to transition out of that mindset. Light a candle, take a shower, or engage in a simple mindfulness exercise to signal closure for the day.

Check In with Yourself Regularly
Before and after writing sessions, pause to assess your emotional state. Jotting a few thoughts down in your writer’s notebook or using a simple rating system can help you track how your work is affecting you.

Balance Heavy Writing with Joyful Activities
Counterbalance the emotional weight of your work with activities that bring you joy—gardening, dancing, reading lighthearted books, or spending time with friends.

Maintain a Strong Support Network
Share your emotional responses to your writing with trusted friends, fellow writers, or a therapist. Talking through your emotional experiences can help you process them more effectively.

Physically Ground Yourself
Writing intense material can leave you feeling untethered. Engage in grounding activities like yoga, stretching, or walking barefoot outside to reconnect with your body.

Take Breaks Without Guilt
Step away when needed. Whether it’s an hour, a day, or a week, giving yourself space to rest and recharge is part of the creative process, not a failure to push through.

Separate Reality from Fiction
Remind yourself that your characters’ pain and struggles aren’t your own. Visualizing a metaphorical “door” you close after writing can help you leave the fictional world behind.

Curate a Self-Care Bundle
Have a “writer’s comfort kit” on hand for tough moments. Include soothing items like herbal tea, a favorite playlist, stress balls, candles, or inspirational quotes.

Seek Professional Guidance if Needed
Writing about trauma, taboo topics, or deeply personal emotions may bring up unexpected feelings. A therapist can provide tools to navigate these emotions healthily.

Viewing your writing as a full body experience, including your emotional body, will help you work through obstacles when you feel compelled to shy way from your practice due to fear of feeling deep emotions.

Let me know in the comments which practices you already use and if you try a new one.

As always… Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Starting Your Book—Step 1: Planning

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Photo by Polina Kovaleva

“Go, sit upon the lofty hill, And turn your eyes around, Where waving woods and waters wild Do hymn an autumn sound. The summer sun is faint on them— The summer flowers depart— Sit still— as all transform’d to stone, Except your musing heart.”

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

What are you holding in your musing heart that wants to make its way onto the page? Fall is a great time to refocus and honor our impulse to write—herbal tea, spiced cider, or mulled wine by your side.

And it isn’t too soon to establish a plan so you can finally start that book that’s nestled down inside your heart at the beginning of 2024.

To help, here’s your first step in building a solid foundation for your first draft.

PLANNING

Grab the downloadable, fillable handouts mentioned in this video right here.

Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Do You Really (Really, Really) Want to Write Your Book? Investing in Yourself is the Answer

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I know many of you want to write a book, or at the very least, have a regular writing practice. I also know that way too many of you are struggling to make it happen. Creating, developing, and maintaining a writing practice requires both intention and attention. It also requires a whole lot of self-love. Making a few tweaks to your thinking could very well make all the difference and set you on your way to not just starting—but finishing—that book that’s been rumbling around in your mind and heart for way too long.

Think of it as an investment in yourself.

I always tell my clients and workshop participants that honoring our impulse to write and create is an act of self-love.

I believe this impulse to create is our life force wanting to move and flow, and when we stifle it, we experience dis-ease on mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual levels. Living in the modern (read: capitalist) world puts most of us to the test when it comes to honoring our creativity—and sometimes even recognizing it.

To truly tend to our own precious minds, hearts, souls, and spirits, we must tend to our creative impulses and invest in ourselves.

So, how can you invest in yourself when you want to write a book?

Privilege your writing practice in your mind.

Make it as important to your day as all the responsibilities you make time for on a regular basis. Instead of thinking I’ll get to my writing after I’ve taken care of X, Y, and Z, think I’m going to write XX days each week (or XX hours or XX pages).

Tell people.

Let people who are close to you know that you’ve made a decision to privilege your writing. Tell them what you need from them to make it happen. Time? Space? Quiet? Respect?

Give it space—in your day, on your calendar, and in your home.

Change some habits if you need to. Reduce time spent on social media, TV, and shooting-the-breeze phone conversations to create more time in your days. It all adds up.

Mark it on your calendar and treat it with respect. If you had a doctor’s appointment for yourself, for one of your kids, or for your pet… or a meeting at work, you’d remember it, you’d plan the rest of your day around it, and you’d show up for it.

Designate a spot in your home as your private, personal writing space where no one else is allowed. If you’re not able to do this, find a time when the people you live with are out of the house or asleep. Or find a place outside your home where you can write. If you don’t need quiet, coffee shops and pubs are great places to hole up and let the words flow (and you’ll be supporting local business at the same time!). If you do need quiet, head to your local library and find a quiet corner (some libraries even allow you to reserve a separate room to use for a specified period of time).

Get a new writer’s notebook.

Think of this notebook as a place for you to jot down your ideas and thoughts—about your writing—that drift in and out of your brain as you go about your day, as you’re drifting off to sleep, or when you first wake up in the morning. If you’re a journaler, you can keep doing that, but in a separate notebook. A writer’s notebook and a journal are two different things.

Read.

“Reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” So says Annie Proulx. Read books in the same vein as the one you want to write. Read books that are different from the one you want to write. Read short fiction. Read non-fiction. Read novels. Read poetry. There’s something to learn from them all.

View yourself as a writer.

Instead of seeing yourself as a parent or an employee at a company or organization who wants to write, see yourself as a writer who happens to also be a parent and/or an employee. And if you’ve yet to be published, it doesn’t make you less legit than people who have been published.

If it helps, use a mantra. Say I am a writer over and over in your thoughts throughout the day. Or writing is not a luxury. Or writing is an act of self-love. You’ll start to believe it.

Know that it’s a mind game.

So much of the act of getting the words on the page—is all in the mind. When we can think about writing differently, we can show up for it and give the creative impulse inside us the respect it deserves.

What can you do to move your writing practice further up your list of “Important Things To Do”?

Sending you mad writing mojo…

10 Steps to Plan for NaNoWriMo

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Photo by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

October will soon come to a close and November will be upon us. That means it’s time to prepare for NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month.

This will be my first year taking the challenge. Instead of officially registering for the event on the NaNoWriMo website, I and my writing group are doing the challenge to get our in-progress novels completed by the end of November. (I’m about one-third of the way in on mine…)

Having intention is one thing, but we need to do more if we want to see success with a challenge of this magnitude. Planning is essential, and it paves the way for successful implementation.

So first, let’s look at the goal itself.

The NaNoWriMo challenge assumes approximately 50K words total. That equates to 1667 words per day (5 double-spaced pages / Times New Roman 12 pt font) or 69 words per hour.

Having these numbers in mind will help you begin to break down the task into manageable pieces.

Now, here are some tips to help you do that.

  • Plan—Take care of any business or obligations in your life that can be completed before November.
    • If you celebrate Thanksgiving and it’s traditionally your job to shop and cook, make your shopping list before November 1. When the day comes, enlist people to help you. (Do it!) And if you absolutely must miss writing on this day, decide where you’ll double up on another day—in advance—to stay on track.
    • If you have other special days to celebrate—an anniversary, a birthday—again, get your shopping done before November 1. If you need to mail packages, get them wrapped and ready before November 1. Mark the trip to your package delivery service on your calendar.
    • Create a Plan B. No matter how much we plan, people and situations beyond our control can interfere. If you have a solid Plan B in place for the days that go awry, they won’t throw a giant wrench in the works and will only derail you for a short time.
  • Schedule—Block out the times you’ll write on your calendar. (I’m a geek for calendars, so this is one of my favorite parts of preparing for projects.)
    • Determine which calendar works best for you: digital or analog. (I use a combination of both.)
    • Reserve blocks of writing time in your calendar. If you use digital, color code those blocks time with a color ONLY used for writing. If you use analog, use a highlighter to accentuate the blocks of time you’ve designated for writing.
  • Shift Your Mindset—Rather than think of the challenge as daunting, make it fun. Starting with a defeatist mindset from the get-go (or at all) will be a giant deterrent to successful completion.
    • Write down mantras. (“Writing is fun.” “This draft is only for me.” “Perfection is not necessary.” “My writing comes first.”) Or make up your own. Repeat them to yourself every time your mind drifts into defeatist territory.
    • Write a letter to the voices in your head. Let them know they are not welcome, at least, and especially, not for the month of November.
  • Commit—Treat your commitment to NaNoWriMo as you would a commitment to someone you care about very much. Make it a priority. Privilege it (at least in your thinking) above all else. Just for a month…
    • Clean and prepare your workspace. This will send a message to your brain that this is important, that you mean business, that it matters to you.
    • Enlist the help of family and friends. Tell the people in your life what you’ll be doing. Tell them how much it means to you. Ask for their help in the form of respecting the times you’ve set aside to write.

For more detailed and hands-on help, check out the first four COMPLIMENTARY modules of my Conjuring Clarity course, created to help you accomplish these first four steps.

Now, for the writing itself.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash
  • Know your people—Make a list of your protagonist(s), antagonist(s), and supporting characters.
    • What traits and characteristics define who they are as people? Think big. Think small.
  • Know your people’s backstories—Knowing your characters’ histories will inform why they want what they want and why, as well as what obstacles they will face, both internal and external.
    • Where are they from? Where are they now?
    • What has happened to them in the past (especially their deepest wounds).
  • Know your milieu—Make detailed notes about your story world. Do research beforehand, as needed.
    • Where does your story take place? What are the characteristics of this place?
    • When does your story take place?
    • Do any special rules apply to your story world (as in fantasy, sci fi, or magical realism)?
  • Determine your opening scene and inciting incident—Having a clear starting place will go far to start you off with a smooth beginning.
    • What is your opening scene? How will you set the stage and engage the reader? What does the status quo life of your protagonist look like when the story begins?
    • What (inciting) incident or event will turn your protagonist’s world on its axis and set them on their journey?
  • Create an outline—While it’s true that we gain insight about characters and what they want and why as we write, having some kind of framework to focus on will help you keep moving forward with a tight deadline like this.
    • What is your protagonist’s deepest desire and why? (Hint: This is oftentimes connected with their wound from the past.)
    • Given your protagonist’s personality, how will they attempt to realize their desire?
    • Given what your antagonist wants, how will he/she/it interfere with your protagonist’s progress?
    • What’s your ending? This can be hard to know sometimes, but make a guess for now, then set up a series of events and/or key scenes that you know will be relevant to the storyline.
  • Relax, trust, and let go—Surrendering to the process, letting go of any preconceived ideas about the finished product will give you the creative space to see you through to November 30.
    • Think of this draft as an abstract painting. Put down what comes to you without feeling the need to edit as you write. (You can do that in December.) Use big, broad brushstrokes. Use tiny, finite brushstrokes.
    • Be willing to both stick to your outline and shift your course when new, surprising ideas show up. This is the give and take of the creative process.

Want to go even deeper with Steps 5-8? Check out the second four modules of the Conjuring Clarity course.

Want to go even deeper with Steps 5-8? Check out the second four modules of the Conjuring Clarity course.

Want to go even deeper with knowing your people by experiencing the magic of the Writing Through the Body™ method?

Check out the COMPLIMENTARY Intro to Writing Through the Body™ video.

Check out the entire Writing Through the Body™ course.

I hope these tips help. Please let me know, in the comments, if you’re doing NaNoWriMo. Then, come back after November 30 and let me know how it went.

And remember… ANY progress is good progress. We can do this!

Sending you mad writing mojo…

Happy writing!

Johnnie
XO