Welcome back to another Creator’s Roulette feature, friends! Today I am hosting author P. J. Marie who shares her wealth of experience as a project manager and engineer and how it applies to writing. For all of you who are looking for new tools to support your creative pursuits, this post is bound to give some ideas. Let’s meet P. J. and then drive right into it!
Engineer by trade, P. J. Marie has always been a storyteller at heart. Inspired by the captivating tales that her Ukrainian grandfather used to tell about settling the Canadian prairies, P. J. has always looked at life through a narrative lens.
An avid creator, P. J. loves the design process from start to finish and is always working on projects that meld the structured world of engineering with her creative passions. Whether through world-building, crafting cosplays, or building custom bookshelves for her ever-growing collection of novels, manga, and terrible monster movies, P. J. is always working on something.
In her spare time, she enjoys collecting new skills, drinking copious amounts of tea, and spending time with her family and adorable doggo.
Why Tools Optimize Your Creativity (not stifle it), and How to Use Them Effectively
By P. J. Marie
Joining the creative writing community has been an incredible experience, especially since writing is something that I have done my whole life, both professionally and recreationally. It has involved meeting many new people, writing a lot of things (who knew?), and doing a ton of research. I have learned more than I could have ever anticipated and connected with people who write all sorts of genres – and recently, I noticed a trend among some new fellow writers regarding their mentality on creativity that made me reflect.
Creativity and imagination drive us to do what we do, so I was surprised to find that there are many people who don’t use creative tools because they think it will stifle their creativity. I was a bit confused by this, but when I thought about it more, I realized that I also used to think that.
As someone who deals with anxiety in a variety of formats and constantly feels pressure to do everything ‘perfectly,’ I tend to be my own worst enemy. I avoided using writing tools for a long time because I believed that they cramped my style. After all, I was writing to be creative and express myself, not to follow the rules, conform to someone else’s ideas, or be restricted by tools. Besides, if we’re being honest, I thought that the tools were a waste of time, and frankly, they overwhelmed me. They looked like more work than they were worth, and I didn’t see the benefit. It wasn’t until I ditched most of my other hobbies and jumped completely into writing three years ago that I realized I was looking at creative writing tools with the wrong mindset. I was using them ineffectively, and – lo and behold – I had a bunch of skills from my day job as a Project Manager that complimented creative writing tools and could translate over to the writing process if I changed the way I thought about things.
So, I started to dabble with tools, and by using them, I was able to write over 1.6 million words in the last two and a half years, completing several novels, short stories, poems, and novellas that will never see the light of day. Some of these stories I wrote for practice, others are stories that I wrote for friends or for my own enjoyment, and one turned into my first ‘official’ novel, which I just published last year. I have since refined my process, incorporating everything that I learned during my writing journey and have nailed it down to a ‘routine’ that enables me to complete a first draft novel within one month.
That’s right – one full book between 80,000 and 140,000 words long.
Now, just to clarify here, I’m talking strictly about writing the book. I usually need another two to four weeks to plan my book using the tools I’m going to cover below, so I don’t have any plans of publishing twelve books a year. There’s still a lot of work that has to be done before you publish, and there are things that will slow you down along the way – such as waiting for edits, incorporating edits, waiting for beta reader feedback, setting up your author platform, cover design, blurb writing, and book layout and formatting (if you go the self-publishing route), or querying agents and publishers (if you go the traditional route). All of which take a lot of time and effort and are a whole other topic that I won’t be covering in this article.
In between all of that, life happens, and things get in the way. I often get delayed, and I don’t always meet my deadline of one novel a month – but I know my system. I know what tools work for me, and I follow the process I established the best that I can. As a result, I am now easily and reliably able to crunch out anywhere from 4,000 to 12,000 words in a day, depending on the book I’m writing.
But I didn’t start that way. When I first started writing, it was nearly an unbearable process, and it took me hours and hours just to get a few hundred words on the page. However, over time, and with testing out these different tools to see how I could essentially hack my own mind and demand more from it, I was able to find a way to increase my output and relieve some of the stress and anxiety writing brought me by offloading that stress onto the support system I built around me. And today, I want to share what I learned with you in the hopes that it might be helpful and relieve some of your writing stress as well.
Below I cover some of my favourite tools for writing, outlining why they are effective, how to use them, and some personal observations that I have made while utilizing them. Please note that this is not a complete list of writing tools, and this is just my personal opinion based on my own experiences. There are many others out there and plenty of author-specific approaches. These are just the ones that I found worked best for me and several of my author friends. However, I would encourage you to find and develop your own tools as you go, creating a custom writing approach suited to you so you can hack your own creativity and focus on the story instead of the stress of finishing your book.
- Software & Folder Management
Every writer out there will have a preferred method to capture their thoughts – whether it be voice recordings, writing notes by hand, or emailing yourself snippets of stories as they pop into your head. There are a lot of tools and a wide variety of software available, and you will find people who swear by any number of them, but you want to find something that works for you and the style of your writing habits. If you write on the go when you only have five minutes to spare in between work, driving home, making dinner, or hitting the gym, then something like Google Drive or another cloud-based program is going to be way more helpful than a piece of software that sits on your PC at home and is inaccessible to you when you’re out doing life things. Being able to work from your phone, laptop, or PC interchangeably will not only make writing feel less like a task that you have to do, but it will also make it easier because now you can quickly jot down your thoughts as they come.
What it comes down to is finding the right tool for the job and using what helps you, not what is popular or what is raved to be the next latest and greatest tool out there. Don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of benefits to using writing software. Tools like Scrivener, Campfire, Atticus, etc., are all great, and I have used them while writing before. But they all come with a learning curve, it takes time to figure out how to use them, and you may not feel like you’ve gotten a return on your investment depending on what you are writing. Something like Campfire is great for high-fantasy, world-building-type stories with multiple characters and tons of details. However, it might not add a lot of value to a YA romance, and a Spreadsheet or Word Processor software would work just as well.
Scrivener has a ton of capability. I know people who swear by this software and will not write without it. You can use it to export your files to EPUB format and keep everything related to your story within one ‘project,’ including research notes, character sheets, and reference images. The visual setup of the program is extremely helpful as well. It allows you to see everything in one place, view your chapters within the novel, and mark their status individually so you can keep track of your progress. However, using any sort of Word Processor software and highlighting chapter titles by a colour-coding system to keep track of progress works just as well and takes the same number of clicks.
My point is that each software has its benefits, but you should never feel like your writing is less because you’re not using a fancy tool designed specifically for writing. Just because it works for one author doesn’t mean that it will work for you. Software can be expensive, too, and it isn’t always affordable. What you really need is good organization and folder management, which can be achieved without spending a dime. Taking a few hours of your time to set up folders or organize your cloud storage to provide revision control works just as well as any program. The important thing is to keep backups. Date your files so you know what the latest copies are. Make a status tracking system with colours or folders that makes sense to you and are easy to navigate. Spend a day setting it up, and once it’s done, you don’t have to worry about it.
Personal Practices:
I will be completely transparent – I have purchased several pieces of software hoping that they would improve my writing, and in the end, after trying them all out, I landed on using Google Drive. It’s just easier for me and suits my writing habits. I can work on my book wherever and whenever I want. I can make copies, back things up, add people to my folders and documents for review as needed and keep track of review comments. This also works well for me because I prefer writing my entire story in a single document as it makes it easier to search and find things later. Then I tend to use MS Excel for my character sheets, using the custom template I made on a Sunday afternoon that suits the level of detail I need.
I keep my folders organized in a way that makes sense for me and tailor my use of software tools to include only the things that benefit me. For me, that’s Grammarly, which I use to check the tone of my writing and improve my grammar on the first draft before the book goes to editing. I also rely on Atticus, which I use to create handsome-looking EPUBs because their formatting tools are easy, quick, intuitive, and they look great.
Don’t feel obligated to use something just because someone says that is the best way to write. If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work. That’s okay, and you do not need to spend money or pay monthly fees to write well or have an organized system.
- Character Sheets
There is absolutely nothing wrong with getting an idea for a book, sitting down to write it, and seeing where it takes you. After all, most books start with an idea moment, and half the fun of writing is watching your own story and characters develop as you go. This is why character sheets and dedicating a little time upfront to setting them up is so helpful and can become a huge asset to your writing and save you a lot of time and frustration later.
There are plenty of character bio templates out there that you can use. Or you can even look into getting programs to help you with this (like Campfire, which I mentioned above), although these are not needed, and I wouldn’t personally recommend them unless you are writing a high-fantasy novel with a bunch of in-depth character backgrounds and stats. In general, a Word Processor document or a Spreadsheet is plenty fine for most books.
The question is, how do you use character sheets without this tool becoming stressful or limiting your creativity?
The answer is to use it like a brainstorming device and a central location to store key information. That way, if you need to reference a detail later or you can’t remember if you described a character’s hair colour previously, a quick search through your character sheet will give you the answer.
A good character sheet will include all the basic physical information about your character: hair colour, height, eye colour, distinguishing features, etc. It should also note the character’s name, nickname, and approximate age. A great character sheet will include more details: character motivations, typical clothing description, where they live, friends, family, life goals, greatest strengths, greatest weaknesses, what makes them unhappy, who they confide in, and, my personal favourite, a secret about them that no one knows. The secret does not need to be revealed in the book. In fact, I would encourage you not to disclose it. The intent of the secret isn’t for it to be plot-related, but for it to be character development related because knowing that they have one makes them more real.
You can find templates for these online, and I recommend finding one you like, removing fields that are not applicable to your genre or story, and then having a standard blank template that you can whip out for each new character you create. But – and this is the most important part of using character sheets as a tool to support you, not as a device to wreck your creativity – you do not need to fill out all the details at the start.
In fact, you never have to fill them all out.
Character sheets are not a task that must be completed to perfection or contain every single little detail possible. They should not cause you mental strain or make you stress about character attributes that you don’t need to worry about. Use the sheet as a database and a brainstorming tool. Add the information as you write to keep track of it in one convenient spot. Spend a few minutes looking over the sheet and thinking about your character, imagine them as a real, living person, then add the details that make sense or the ones that you like. Knowing how your character lives and picturing the layout of their home will help you to get inside their head and write them more consistently. But just because you write it in the character sheet, it doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with it – so don’t worry about that either. You can change it any time.
As you write, your characters are naturally going to grow and change. When it happens, simply update your database. This document should be a living, breathing thing that flows with your creativity, not against it, and filling out the details on the sheet isn’t a chore or a boring task. It’s an adventure into each of the characters’ lives. Remember that spending time in this sheet is spending time with your characters, and each minute you invest thinking about them and filling out this form is another minute you’ve let your brain run wild while you explore them in the world that you have created.
Don’t let character sheets have creative control. Do not let them mandate the details that you have to provide for your creations. Instead, use them as a device to ask questions about your character, spark your imagination, and understand who they are and why they are doing what they are doing. Then, capture that on the sheet, so you don’t lose it, and so you can reference it when, twenty thousand words later, you forget their mother’s name.
This tool is like a hard drive, an extension of your memory bank, and it is there to help. There are no rules regarding how much information you need to record.
- Plot Outline
There is a lot of debate among writers regarding ‘plotting’ and ‘pantsing,’ but personally, I am a firm believer in using and exploiting both of those methods in order to get the best story. Plot outlines are very similar to character sheets. They do not need to be a rigid structure or act as hardcore rules which you’re forced to comply with. Plot outlines are support structures. They stand there quietly by your side, helping to guide and support you while you build your monolith higher.
Plot outlines can change. They, too, are a living, breathing document that will bend and grow with you. They represent a snapshot in time or what you thought would happen at a certain moment during your writing journey, and they are an excellent place to capture all the things that you want to include in your story, so you don’t forget about them. They are an excellent tool for weaving in red-herrings, adding in call-backs, confirming your threads all come together, that nothing is left forgotten, and they are a great tool for monitoring your progress and keeping you on track.
When they first start, they can be just a few sentences long. For example:
a princess decides to rescue herself and escape the castle.
Then you start writing your scene and find out that the princess, in chapter two, befriends the dragon guarding her, who turns out to be a captive as well, and they both escape together.
When this happens, you adjust your plot outline and start splitting up your ideas into proposed chapters. This will help you keep tabs on the size of your story, what happens when, how you plan to reveal it, and it will show you an overall picture of the plot as a cohesive whole. It doesn’t need to record every detail. Having a rough summary of the events of each chapter is enough, and it will help you to make sure that your pacing is even, that you don’t info dump too much too soon, that your characters come into play at the best possible moment, and that the excitement builds exactly how you want. It also helps you find pesky plot holes, locate places for character growth, and breaks your book down into scenes, which are much easier to write.
Similar to the character sheets, it is important to keep in mind that spending a bit of time on your plot summary isn’t a waste, and it is not curbing your creativity or forcing you to adhere to a story. It’s okay to update and change your outline as you go. Sitting inside your plot map and thinking about how the story will play out is world-building. It will help you to organize your thoughts and keep yourself focused, and most importantly, it will get you invested in your own story.
Thinking about how the book will come together is work, and it is important work that should be fun because you should enjoy the story as much as your readers do. All the plot outline does is capture and document your ideas. It gives you something to reference. It is a tool to see the overall picture, but it is by no means a set of chains forcing you to follow a road you don’t want to go down. If something doesn’t work anymore, change it. A plot outline can be one or two pages total or one or two pages per chapter. There are no ‘rules’ you need to comply with to use it. Make your tools work for you, don’t do the work for your tools.
- Timelines
Timelines are very similar to plot outlines and character sheets. Are you sensing a pattern yet? But I added them in because I think they are worth mentioning and because they are different from plot outlines. Timelines are extremely helpful for mysteries, thrillers, high-fantasy tales, or really any story or scene with a complicated sequence of events. In particular, they’re great for stories with multiple timelines, multiple characters, and interwoven plots where a lot of things are happening all at once and the specific time at which events occur matters.
Again, these do not need to be overly complicated or detailed, and they should match what you need. If you need a minute-by-minute recap of what happened during a mysterious murder while a bunch of friends attended a party, then make a table and detail out the events by the minute. If you need to track where your character was over a week, make a table by day and include those details. Timelines are simply a reference to your writing, something to keep open in the background so you can flip back to it and not have to keep crawling through your book searching for details while calculating out the timing for the hundredth time.
You can adjust this tool however you need, and you can use it only for the chapters that make sense. The mindset behind using this tool remains the same; it’s there to support you. You are not obligated to fill out a meticulously crafted minute-by-minute playback of your characters’ actions if it doesn’t make sense to do so or doesn’t add any value. Build them as you write or when you work on your plot outline. Then adjust them as you go and use them as a checklist at the end to make sure that everything fits how you want.
Personal Practices:
I use MS Word tables and Excel Spreadsheets for my timelines. When dealing with complicated plots, I keep my timeline separate from my plot outline. I use multiple sheets within my Spreadsheet, one for the overall plot, and then specific tables to layout finer detailed scenes by day, week, or minute if necessary. I also use them as a means to keep track of who’s in the room when dealing with more than four characters – sketching out a simple ‘map’ to help me keep track of where each character is sitting or standing so I don’t forget who’s there.
- Sprints
Sprints, my newest tool and easily the most effective one I have found to date, are an extremely helpful way to increase your writing per day. Why? Because they’re small, like a bite-size brownie, and low effort to complete.
What are they, and how do they work?
Sprints are timed writing sessions. It’s as simple as that, and you don’t need any fancy tools to use them (although I will note that there are free sprint timers available online and sprint bots in discord that you can use if you’re familiar with the app). But for the purposes of this article, let’s assume we’re not using anything fancy.
To complete a sprint, you set a timer, usually between five and sixty minutes. During that window, the only thing that you do is write. No emails. No Youtube. No memes. No Instagram. No nothing. You make a rule that during the next X minutes of time, you will do nothing but write. And if you can’t write, then you do nothing else. Just sit there. Think about the characters. Think about the story. Think about what they would wear in the scene you’re working on. Think about their home, their back story, what they like to eat or where they like to go. Just because you’re not getting words on the page during your sprint doesn’t mean that you aren’t working.
Thinking about your book is working, and it is hard work. If you only get a few words down in your sprint, that’s okay. It counts. It was worth it, and it was good work because you were 100% committed to your book during that time, and you didn’t let yourself do anything other than think about your story, which is an incredibly satisfying feeling.
Just like everything else, sprints are tools. There are no rules (aside from committing to not touch anything else but your book during your sprint), and you shouldn’t get discouraged if the first few times you try this, it feels weird, and you don’t get much done. It’s a new skill, and just like with learning anything else new, it takes a little bit to figure it out and find what works for you.
But what makes them such an effective tool is that you can customize them to fit into your lifestyle. You don’t have to have hours available to sit down and work on your book. You can squeeze a ten-minute sprint in during lunch on your phone to capture the thoughts you were mulling around in the morning, or you can complete a four hour sprint on the weekend and immerse yourself all day. No matter the length of the sprint, what they do is build the habit of finding time to write and thinking about your book without any distractions.
Personal Practice:
Everyone sprints differently. I know lots of people who like to sprint for sixty minutes, but personally, I hate sprinting for sixty minutes. It doesn’t work well for me, and it doesn’t suit my writing style. It’s too much time, and I get too stressed out. I worry I’m wasting my precious minutes. I worry I’m not getting enough done, and I feel an immense amount of pressure to type hardcore for the full sixty minutes and nearly always get disappointed in my results. Instead, I have found that ten-minute intervals are my sweet spot. I type furiously for ten minutes non-stop, racking up high word counts, which make me feel accomplished and super pleased with myself, and when the ten-minute timer goes off, I’m not done yet. My energy is still high, and I want to start the next sprint so I can finish off what I was doing.
I usually take a minute or two in between each sprint to breathe, collect my thoughts, stretch, revisit the plot outline if necessary to remind myself of what I was thinking about doing in the chapter, and then I think through the next parts of the scene I want to write. I can continue this process over and over, working for several hours in total because they’re such small, rapid bursts that they don’t leave me feeling drained. Then, when I do feel done, I stop.
It is incredibly rewarding. It feels like I have been physically sprinting, and I can end my writing session feeling accomplished. That said, I use this tool as a tool to help me, and I use it to my advantage. If I need a longer break time in between my sprints, I allow it, but I never take my mind off the book or the scenes I plan to write during my sprint. If sprints aren’t working for me that day, I can’t seem to stay focused, or I just want to write at a slower pace, then I don’t sprint at all. I just write.
One important thing I want to note about using this tool is that it is also really important to define how you want to sprint and what your goal is.
Are you sprinting simply to get the words out and on the page? Or are you worried about grammar and perfection and trying to ensure that your draft is as close to the final copy as possible as you write?
Either is fine, but defining the goal upfront will help you stay focused as you sprint and leave you more satisfied with your end results – because writing to get the scene captured and get text on the page that you can come back to later to edit and work with is not the same thing as trying to draft a perfect scene or edit your work. Sprinting to get words on the page will give you a higher and more satisfying word count, whereas editing might result in a net-zero change.
Everyone works differently, so you want to use sprinting in a way that is helpful to you. Personally, I use my sprints to get the words down, and then I come back after to clean up the grammar and perfect the scene. I find this easier because once I have the full chapter recorded, I can see it as a whole, which makes finessing the details or adjusting things around a lot simpler.
Just remember that sprints don’t have to be about high word counts or furious typing. They can be used as ‘block’ time which you are setting aside and dedicating to your story and nothing else. Lots of authors will use sprint groups for motivation and turn it into a competitive format, which is great and inspiring! But if seeing other word counts doesn’t help you, don’t do it. Adapt the tool to suit your needs, don’t bend yourself to fit the imaginary mould of a sprint because it doesn’t exist. A sprint is what you need it to be.
- Goal Setting & Task Break Down
Despite what some people might think, goal setting is a tool, and as an Engineer and Project Manager, it is one of my personal favourites. In my experience, setting goals can often lead to the success of a project or its failure when done poorly. After you decide to write a book, don’t make your goal: “I want to finish this book.”
Obviously, this is the goal and, yes, you will get there. But constantly looking up the side of a mountain where the peak is covered by fog and you cannot see the top while telling yourself that you have to climb it can be overwhelming for some people. It makes it feel like an impossible task and often deters people from trying. Writing is hard. Writing a few hundred words is hard, and writing a full book is even harder.
In my experience, both in the Engineering and Project Management world and within the writing community speaking to friends, one of the main reasons why people do not finish a story or start a story is because they get overwhelmed by the task. It’s too big. It’s stressful. Writing 80,000 words is a lot of words. It’s really hard not to hyper-focus on your progress against the whole and lose confidence.
Let’s say, for example, that you have a day where you write 123 words. Then, because our brains are horrible and we constantly focus on the negatives, we divide 80,000 words by 123 words and realize that it is going to take us over 650 days to write our book.
It’s no wonder people get discouraged and give up or lose hope. We are our own worst enemies, and we constantly get in our heads. We tell ourselves that we are going to fail before we even start, and we set our goals too big by looking at the whole picture – which, while important – really isn’t the best way to complete a task, and it’s certainly not the best mindset to have when trying to accomplish a large goal.
Part of Engineering and Project Management is learning how to take that huge, impossible task and break it down into smaller, much more realistic pieces that make sense so you can execute them more efficiently. When appropriately implemented, incredible things happen, and we can design and construct some pretty cool stuff in short spans of time. Properly breaking down your work into bite-size tasks alleviates unnecessary stress. It helps you focus on the work you are doing currently, which improves your productivity and frees up your mind so your creativity can flow.
Not only does this approach work wonderfully on writing, too, it ties back into all the other tools that were discussed above, and it’s really simple to implement:
Progress Tracking – Shift the Mentality
When tracking your book progress, don’t think about how many words you have completed out of the book. Instead, break it into a smaller scale and measure your progress like this:
- Number of words completed by chapter
- Percentage of chapter completed by chapter
- Number of scenes completed by chapter
- Number of chapters completed by book part
- Number of chapters completed by total chapters
You don’t need to track all of these, and you should pick something that makes sense for your book. The idea is you don’t want to compare your completed words against the estimated whole of the full book. Having 462 words completed out of 80,000 words makes the task of completing the book feel daunting. But having 462 words completed out of a 3,000-word chapter is easier to accept and feels like more of an accomplishment. And having 462 words completed out of a 1,500-word scene within a chapter is even better.
Not only does this approach leave you more motivated and make you feel like you have accomplished something, but it also makes it easier to keep working. Knowing that your next task is to write the second 1,500-word scene of your chapter is a much more reasonable thing to accomplish and mentally prepare yourself to complete compared to needing to finish 78,500 words of your book.
In Project Management, when a project starts, we don’t focus on percentage complete against the whole project because the scale is too huge, and it adds no value. We focus on percentage complete against the nearest milestone. Comparing yourself against a monstrous task doesn’t help you complete it – it just makes it harder to do.
Goals & Tasks – Adding More of Them
Make your goals and tasks achievable, and make lots of them. If you sat down and wrote today, you accomplished a goal – celebrate it. Be proud of the work that you have done, even if it is small. Doing something, anything, is miles better than doing nothing. If you set your goals too large or make your tasks too big, you will never feel like you have accomplished anything, even though you have. Here are some examples of goals and tasks to add to your writing toolbox, so you get a feel for the size I’m talking about:
Goals
- Write once a day for ten minutes
- Mentally plan your next chapter this weekend
- Complete one chapter a week
- Complete one chapter every two weeks
- Fill out one character sheet a day
- Write 100 words in a ten-minute sprint
- Write 500 words in a ten-minute sprint
- Complete one scene per week
- Complete chapter one
Set your weekly writing goal by minutes, words, tasks, or whatever works best for you, but keep it reasonable based on what you know you can actually accomplish. Don’t set yourself up to fail. Use your sprinting tool to help you accomplish the goal and set aside ten minutes a day to work. Then be proud that you did it even if you didn’t get any words on the page.
Tasks
- Finish the first pass on your character sheets this weekend
- Work on your plot outline for an hour
- Research rocketships so you can better write your sci-fi world’s physical principles
- Edit the chapter you just finished
- Reread chapter one and see if it makes sense
- Think about your character’s favourite type of cheese and decide on their wardrobe
All of these tasks are things that need to be done in order for you to finish your book. They are important, and if you complete them, then you should pat yourself on the back. Use the tools you’ve implemented to help you. Reference your plot outline to jog your memory on what you wanted to do. Check your character sheets to confirm your main character’s height to see if it makes sense for the scene you just wrote.
Closing Thoughts
Like everything creative, you need to find what works for you and what is ‘best’ is subjective. Some people use all of these tools, some use none, and some use way more. A lot of figuring out what works comes from trying it and is dependent on the type of book you are writing and the way that you work. However, as someone who has spent over a decade working in a creative design industry with hard deadlines and seemingly impossible tasks – I am a firm believer that tools are there to help, they are worth a try, and really it just comes down to using them effectively and to your advantage.
Implementing a structured approach and developing a process for writing and world-building does not constrain or limit your creativity. Instead, it CULTIVATES it, allowing you to be free from unnecessary stresses. Tools act as a safety net so you can continue to climb your tower endlessly into the sky. They’re there to catch you when you fall or act as a foothold for you to step off of, not to be the boulder crushing down on your shoulders.
If used properly, these tools (and others) act as ASSETS, not shackles. They should work in the background, assisting you, enabling you – not being your main focus – and allowing you to grow, breathe, and write freely with much less anxiety and pressure.
These tools and tactics are FLEXIBLE. Use them to your advantage and know that they can always be changed. They are not set in stone, and they do not all need to be completed before you start. Think of it like scaffolding installed as you construct your building; add to it as you go and take away what you don’t need.
Always remember that writing is personal, and there are no hard rules. Adjust your process as needed, use your tools, and mould them around your life and your unique style. What works one week might not work the next, and that’s okay. Modify your goals, try again, and whatever you do, don’t give up. Writing is a skill that improves with practice, and I, for one, am excited to someday read the stories you share.
Writers, which tool from this article do you find most helpful? Do you have a favourite tool that was not covered by this article?
Tell us in the comments below!
Connect with P. J. Marie on her website, Instagram, Facebook, Goodreads and Twitter.
Check out the homepage of my Creator’s Roulette series and all the articles creators have contributed there so far! Another one that covered tools was by T. G. Campbell, on a well researched book.
Banner Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash
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