When New Year comes around it’s always a good opportunity to renew your writing resolutions. However we all know how hard they are to keep. With the best intentions we may set our goals too high then give up too quickly when we find they are hard to keep. It is better to set a modest goal like writing for ten minutes a day than promising to write 3000 words a day, seven days a week. 500 words a day is always my target. I know once I start I will always do more and I have the satisfaction of achieving it easily. Of course you have to remember to give your self days off and pace yourself so you don’t expend all your energy in your first burst then have nothing left. Making writing part of your daily rituals like cleaning your teeth is good. Sit down with your morning tea or coffee and write for five or ten minutes. Write in dot points if you have too then make an appointment with yourself to write them up later in the day. The Write When You Can method is good for busy people with unpredictable schedules but requires a commitment to use any spare moment for your writing.

You also need to make sure to have some solid time blocks pencilled on the weekends for consolidating your weekly snippets. If weekdays are a complete wipe out you can always set aside time on the weekends. If you need some extra guidance I’m pleased to announce the revised edition of the  WRITE YOUR BOOK ON A WEEKEND Workbook is now available as an E book. If you follow the WOW plan in three to six months you could have your draft finished! Get your copy now at the Writers Journey Shop.

BOOKING NOW!  Fiji Island Lab, Desert Writers, Backstage Bali, Mekong Meditations, Moroccan Caravan.

We all have moments of finding writer’s nirvana – those times when there is no separation between you and the page, when the writing flows in one continuous stream of inspired imagery, language and metaphor, when you know without a doubt that all you ever want to do is to write.

‘Who cares if my writing never sees the light of day’ you find yourself thinking in these windows of pure clarity when the distractions of the mind are vanquished in the sheer joy of entering so completely into the creative flow. The nagging questions of  ‘will I ever finish,  will I ever publish, will I succeed brilliantly or fail  miserably,’  become irrelevant.

It just doesn’t matter!

Of course we know such moments won’t last, something happens to interrupt you and you bemoan the fact it may take you days, months, even weeks to get back in the flow again. Like wanting to dive back into a wonderful dream before it is over  -  if only you could work out how to recreate the conditions that got you there.

We forget that all you have to do is enter into the present, wherever you are – be still, observe, describe what you see, begin again from this moment, not the one you had once before or the one you long for again, but this moment, now.

We have been remembering this on our Mekong Writers Lab in Luang Prabang, Laos. The great river flows by with all its strength and power,  just as our stories flow on (regardless of whether we want to listen to them or not), in the deep underground recesses of our hearts and minds.  With a little help and support from each other we remember how to step into the canoe without capsizing, how to take the paddle and stroke confidently until we are far enough out into the current to let go, to give in to the force of the river and find our way back to writer’s nirvana, realising that it was there all the time and all that had happened was -  we had just lost our way up the proverbial creek.

Coming up

December – Cambodia Workshop Tour

March -  Fiji Writers Lab

June - Desert Writers

July – Backstage Bali

and check out our new trip for Jan 2013 – Moroccan Caravan

My students are always coming up with great reasons they can’t write – I’m waiting until I get a break from work, finish the renovations, til the kids start school, til the kids grow up, til the kids get married (substitute your own sequence of excuses) …then I will sit down and write this book.

I say Seize The Moment, the best time to write is now, even just for ten minutes, if that’s all you have. Ten minutes a day adds up.  Say you can write 300 words in ten minutes and you did that every day for one year, you will have written 109,500 words. That’s a whole book! If you wrote 500 words a day in one year it’s 182,500. That’s two books! In this month of NaNoWriMo when people are writing like mad why don’t you make a pact with a writing friend to write 500 words a day and see how it feels. I guarantee you will forget to stop when the month is over. Renew your promise and go again for the next month and on into the new year. You won’t want to stop.

That’s what we’ll be doing in Cambodia this December. After our two weeks in Luang Prabang, in partnership with some new found collaborators, I’ve lined up Seize the Moment Workshops and Author  Events in Siem Reap, Battambang and Phnom Penh. I have plugged into a vibrant network of artists dedicated to supporting local communities in a myriad of ways. Like the Grace House Community, the Ponheary Ly Foundation, Cafe Kinyei, Hotel 1961, Java Arts and many more.

Then I’m taking some time off to work on my book. Oops, see I’m doing it too. Ok, that’s it. Ten minutes now. I will, if you will …. pens, keyboards ready -  go!

And don’t forget to check out our new journey – Moroccan Caravan  and the new  FREE  TIPS and WRITING PROMPTS PAGE.

The writing itself, once you get down to it, doesn’t take long. It’s everything you do to avoid writing that takes up all the time. If you put your mind to it you could write a book on a weekend!

So I wrote sometime last decade in a workshop manual for my workshop of the same name. The manual was written on a weekend so I know it is possible. It’s around 10,000 words long and shows you how in the first weekend to make a story map, write your synopsis, chapter outline and  start on Chapter 1. Then if you set aside a weekend per chapter, in three to six months you will have your first draft in your hand! I’ve taught this workshop many times over since then, in fact I’m teaching it this weekend in Sydney at WEA.  Keep your eyes peeled for soon I’ll be bringing it out as an e-book so it will be available for all. Here’s another quote…

When you finally allow yourself to be in the writing zone, everything else will fall away; there will be just you and the writing, and you will wonder what took you so long.

  ‘Narrator voice is the doorway through which the reader enters your  story’ – so I have been telling my students all week. Gary Disher mentions this in his great little book Writing Fiction. I’d never thought of it in that way before and that’s why I love the teaching process. ‘The teacher teaches what the teacher needs to know’ is an idea I’ve always agreed with so I love it when I discover these pearls in the process of encouraging others. The idea of the doorway is one I use often when discussing finding the the way into the writing and the world of our story. Of course this portal is always there  just waiting to be opened but too often in our busyness we walk right past and don’t even notice it.  We need to slow down a little and not be so intimidated by its power and beauty ; find ways to approach it, open it just a crack, put our toe inside, then a whole foot, a whole leg, venture in for a while, play around, no pressure to produce, just frolic in the wonder of this new world we want to create but are still a little afraid of.

This November  in Luang Prabang, Laos, in workshops by the Mekong River we will be stepping through doorways like this into the temple of our imagination. No pressure, no stress, just us and the handmade mulberry paper we gather from the paper making village across the river.  Why not join us?

Mekong Writers Lab  Nov 20 – 27

Mekong Meditations  Nov 27 – Dec 4