How to Plan a Daily Writing Practice

A routine supports your inner writer.

The primary purpose of this article is to offer advice to novice writers who want to begin the process of writing a book. By that, I mean people who are serious about steadily producing pages of content toward a goal of completing a novel, memoir, or nonfiction book.

If this is you, the advice I’m offering is basic but useful for finding your inner author’s place in your world. You must take your inner author seriously and give it every advantage to succeed.  

THE WHERE, WHEN, AND HOW OF DAILY WRITING

Let’s start by establishing the place, time, and method you will offer your inner author. The purpose is to create a ritual-like atmosphere around your writing sessions.

Where

Where will you write each time? A designated spot is important for new writers. A chair in your bedroom? Your couch in the living room? The breakfast table? At the library or neighborhood coffee shop? A park bench! Choose a place that provides you with the right atmosphere: the right amount of light, quiet, and comfort. Make that your writing spot and go there for each session.

When

When will you write? What time of day will work for you? Early morning with your first cup of coffee might be your time. Maybe after you get the kids off to school or the hour before they get back home. If you work, maybe you will write during your lunch break. Or in bed at the end of the day. Find a time that works with your schedule and stick to it each time you write.

How

How will you write? This refers to the method of writing that works best for you: on your laptop, at a PC or Mac, a touchscreen device like an iPad, or good old pen to paper. Use whichever method you are most comfortable with. If you are quietly scoffing at my mention of pen and paper, consider this—writing with a pen on paper uses different parts of your brain than typing. Research confirms that handwriting improves memory, learning, and cognitive processing. Handwriting allows you to feel more expressive and stimulates creativity. If you are a mature (read, senior) man or woman, you might know that cursive writing is used in therapy to increase cognitive function and stave off mental decline.

SETTING DAILY GOALS

Use these guidelines to set the goal for your writing sessions. Choose the option that you are most comfortable with. But once you set a goal, strive to achieve it at each session.

An Amount of Time

Write for a specified amount of time each session, then stop. Decide what you think you can achieve and give it a try. You can always raise or lower your time goal. Example: Each session, I will write for 30 minutes; 1 hour; 2 hours. When I have written for that amount of time, I will stop.

A Number of Words

Write a specified number of words each session, then stop. Decide what you think you can achieve and give it a try. You can always raise or lower your word count goal. Example: Each session, I will write 250 words; 500 words; 1000 words. When I have written this number of words, I will stop.

A Number of Pages

If you are handwriting, write enough to fill a certain number of pages in your notebook, then stop. Decide what you think you can achieve and give it a try. You can always raise or lower your page count goal. Example: I will fill 3 pages in my notebook each session; 5 pages; 10 pages. Then I will stop.

GETTING STARTED EACH DAY

How slowly or how quickly will you get starting writing at each session and how slowly or quickly will you produce your writing? If you prefer to ease into a writing session and need something to get the juices flowing, try one of these exercises:

• Start by writing 5 feelings or emotion words that capture how you feel at that moment before you begin to write. Examples: excited, nervous, confident, worried, brave, uncertain, happy, disorganized, tired, upbeat, focused. Don’t overthink it. Don’t elaborate. Just acknowledge these feelings—good or bad—and use them to fuel your writing during this session.

• Reread your previous day’s writing before you begin this session and write a short reflection on it. Yes, you are taking a few minutes to write about your writing! It can be very illuminating. If you are disappointed in your writing from the previous day, don’t beat yourself up! Note what disappoints you, shake it off, and keep going.  

Some prefer to start putting down words as quickly as possible, writing as fast as their hand can travel across the paper or fingers can fly on a keyboard. Others like to take it as slowly and meticulously as possible. There’s no right or wrong method—do whatever works for you.

SUMMARY

If you are a newbie writer, establishing a routine for your writing is not just a good idea, it’s recommended for making progress. Famous authors, with multiple books and accolades under their proverbial belts, use these same techniques book after book, year after year. Having a special place, time, and method for writing puts you in the right frame of mind to produce. Your brain recognizes the environment you have created and snaps into writing mode automatically. Give my suggestions a try. Let me know which ones work for you. Add your own tricks to get into a writing headspace that others might find helpful.

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.

Beta Readers: Who They Are, What They Do

Beta reader at work!

The process of writing a book manuscript can be exhausting and confusing, especially for novice writers. They might ask themselves every day, “Is my writing any good?” Does the plot/storyline make sense?” “Does my book fulfill the promise I made to the reader?” “Are my characters likeable and fully formed?” (This applies to memoir, as well.).

If you want answers to these questions before you publish, beta readers can be helpful in improving the overall quality of your manuscript by offering focused feedback about the elements of your writing.

How to avoid the wrong beta reader

The purpose of a beta reader is often a point of contention between writers and editors. Most newbie writers want to have their writing reviewed by people in their lives, people they are comfortable sharing their writing with: family members, friends, coworkers. This is a bad idea, for several reasons.

First, folks who know you will generally want to be kind, supportive, and encouraging, especially family and friends. They know how hard you’ve worked, how much time you’ve put into your writing, and how much this book means to you. So you will have their backing 100 percent, no matter what.

Second, a beta reader should be—really, must be—an avid book reader; someone who spends a lot of time following storylines, getting to know characters, enjoying good dialogue, and appreciating atmosphere, description, and setting. In other words, wallowing in the elements of a good book. A beta reader who doesn’t read books on a regular basis isn’t ideal.

Third, beta readers should always be given a checklist of questions about those elements of your manuscript that they will evaluate as they read. Asking someone to read your manuscript and comment openly about anything and everything will not yield useful information. Beta reader feedback is most helpful when each reader answers the same specific questions about different aspects of your writing. The ability to compare and contrast feedback is essential to learn how to improve your manuscript.

Tips for choosing the right beta reader

Since I’ve told you who you don’t want to ask to read your manuscript and what mistakes to avoid, it leads naturally into a review of how to select the best beta readers and get the most helpful feedback.

Your beta readers should be people who don’t know you intimately, and total strangers are a good option. These people are much more likely to be honest in their critique. Additionally, people who don’t know your story (particularly in the case of a memoir) will not know anything about you and your situation other than what you share in the manuscript. They can’t “fill in the blanks” because all they know is what they’ve read. If the story is missing key information or if characters—especially you, in the case of memoir—are under-developed, someone who doesn’t know you will spot this immediately.

A beta reader who has some exposure to the genre who’ve written for is a plus. If you’ve written a memoir, the beta reader ideally has read other memoirs. If it’s self-help, they should have experience reading books of that kind. I don’t work with fiction, but obviously, if you’ve written a sci-fi or fantasy manuscript, a romance, a mystery, or a thriller, it’s a good idea to have beta readers who are familiar with those specific genres.

A feedback checklist

The primary way to get the most meaningful feedback from your beta readers is to provide them with a checklist of questions to answer. This doesn’t have to be long or elaborate and plenty of good checklists already exist. To start, make sure your checklist asks these questions that apply to any nonfiction book or memoir:

• The Why: Is there a clearly stated purpose? Is the reason for writing the book obvious?

• The Who: Who is the ideal audience? Who is this book specifically written for? Is the language appropriate to that audience?

With fiction, your book is written for a particular genre. The Why is to produce a book people will want to buy, read to the end, and recommend. The Who, your audience, will include readers who have an affinity for that type of book or are just dipping a toe into the genre.

I want to reiterate an important point about memoir that I have made in other blog articles I’ve written: a memoir has more in common with a novel than with a nonfiction book. Why? Memoir is a subgenre of creative nonfiction—nonfiction because it is factual and creative because the structure is novel-like. Think Wild, Educated, Angela’s Ashes, The Glass Castle, The Year of Magical Thinking, or Eat, Pray, Love. These memoirs read like novels. For this reason, a beta reader feedback checklist for a novel often works well with a memoir.

I am not going to link you to any particular checklists. Many lovely people on the interweb have created wonderful such lists. To find them, do a Google search for any of the following:

• Beta reader checklist

• Beta reader questionnaire/beta reader questions

• Beta reader instructions

Find the one that best suits your manuscript, as some will be more appropriate than others. You can always add to and modify any list you choose.

Final thoughts

Feedback from beta readers can be extremely helpful in improving the focus, overall quality, and reader engagement of your manuscript. But each beta reader should be chosen carefully and given detailed instruction about their feedback if the process is to be truly useful.

Let me know what you think of this article. I appreciate your comments and suggestions.

~~Trish Lockard is a freelance editor and writing coach, specializing in nonfiction and memoir. Her business is Strike The Write Tone. She is the co-author, along with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism.

When There is No There There in Memoir

There.

Have you heard the expression “There is no there there”? Do you understand the meaning?

In 1937, American author Gertrude Stein published the book Everybody's Autobiography. In Chapter 4, Stein recounts returning to her home town of Oakland, California, while on a lecture tour in 1935. The city had grown and changed enormously since her childhood there. When she tried to find her childhood home, she learned that it had been demolished and new structures had been built on the land. She called the realization “painful nostalgia.”

Here is the full quote:

… I kept searching for the next new city where I would truly find myself, where I would be content in my own skin. But, of course, I eventually realized that, no matter where I went, there was no “there” there.

Today, according to Urban Dictionary, the expression “There is no there there” means “an utter lack of substance or veracity as it pertains to the subject under discussion.” The website yourdictionary.com defines it as, “The indicated thing, person, or other matter has no distinctive identity, no significant characteristics, or no functional center point.”

Does your memoir have a there?

I did a little Googling about the expression “there is no there there” because I keep hearing it in conversation and I wasn’t sure I truly understood what it means. After reading numerous definitions, such as the two provided, it struck me that this expression could be used to describe a challenge faced by many novice memoir writers: their memoir manuscript does not have a clear and obvious there. As a memoir writing coach, sussing out the central, core point of a memoir is the most crucial and yet the most difficult aspect of memoir writing.

This is another way of saying, a memoir must have a clear theme (point or argument) that every scene, every story told, must support. In her latest book, Blueprint for a Memoir, author Jennie Nash breaks down the essential way a memoir should be constructed. Her approach consists of Scene, Point, Impact. According to Nash, the Impact (in which you make it clear why the reader should care about the scene and how it connects to the larger theme) is missing in memoirs that don’t work. Without it being crystal clear why you have included a story in your memoir, why the story is essential to the overarching argument you are making, you have failed to provide meaning-making for the reader. If readers ask themselves, “Why are you telling me this?” and you don’t provide an answer, your memoir loses its power and appeal.

Can you find the there of your memoir?

Think about Gertrude Stein going in search of her childhood home, longing for the joy the sight would bring her, only to find the house gone and all trace of it extinguished. Such a disappointment. Such painful nostalgia. She was left feeling anchorless, adrift. As you craft your memoir, keep Stein’s story in mind. In your memoir, will you bring the readers to the place you want to show them? Or will there be no there there?

Postscript

Prolific writer Gertrude Stein wrote Everyone’s Autobiography as a continuation of the memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in 1933. In addition to her now-famous quote, “There is no there there,” Stein wrote another oft-quoted line, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” in the1913 poem “Sacred Emily.”

Jennie Nash’s book Blueprint for a Memoir: How to Write a Memoir for the Marketplace was published in 2023 by Tree Farm Books, Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of twelve books in three genres.