If you stretch before you exercise, do you warm up before you write?

I hadn’t realized it before, but I have a pretty solid writing routine which oddly enough involves–writing. How many times have you sat down to your computer or a blank piece of paper and tried to force yourself to write a proposal, blog post, article, book and just got absolutely nowhere? Staring at a blank screen, a blinking cursor and just not knowing where to start. If you’re anything like me, or most people for that matter, it’s probably happened a lot.

This morning I started my routine to hammer out Chapter 5 of Using WordPress but to start I first:

• Checked email
• Checked Twitter
• Read my RSS feeds
• Checked Twitter some more
• Wrote a blog post (Twitter / Tris Hussey: Writing warm up done- http …)

It took me a while to get through all this, but I know myself well enough now that I had to do it. Just as I’m taking a break from Chapter 5 (which is going pretty well, thank you for asking) to write this post. See I figured out, by accident, that I needed to have a writing warmup in order to be able to get anything decent out of my brain and into the computer. I’ve tried to sit down to write chapters before without “warming up” and the result is pitiful.

No focus, no plan. Words don’t form, phrases escape me…until I stop, read, write something else and go back to it.

So maybe it isn’t writer’s block, but writer’s cramp. Start too fast, run too hard, get a mental cramp and fall down.

Now all I have to do is remember to slog through some reading and posting before I start on a chapter. Instead of thinking of it as procrastinating, I need to think of it as warming up, mental stretches, the stuff you need to do to really get going strong.

Related posts:

1. It isn’t starting a book that’s hard, it’s continuing to write it Book Three is starting to gel, but it’s been a...
2. Sometimes you just have to write I’m sure you’ve heard the expression “fake it til you...
3. Because it’s easier than saying “Create your own interactive website where you write what you want” I’m going to tell you something that us “experts” don’t...
4. Don’t have to write a book in Word, really When I started writing this book, I started with a...