As I begin this new journey, I find myself reflecting on what habits I can develop as a writer.The most important one, and one I've always known about myself, is I need to create a quiet space for myself to write. I am not someone who writes well when other people are around or there is a great deal of activity for multiple reasons:
- I revise constantly as I write. I envy those people who can start a blog post and have it done in 15 - 20 minutes. I find that I am rereading sections and entire paragraphs to fine-tune them all the time. To do that effectively, I need quiet space -- space where I can reread sentences out loud to capture their flow, space where I hopefully can choose the best word for the phrase, space where I can spread out notes and work that support me as I work/write.
- I am horrible at multi-tasking. My brain can just not assimilate conversations people might want to have with me at the same time I am working on the flow of a piece. Every time I'm interrupted by a family member or the painters that are currently painting the exterior of our house or a phone ringing, I basically have to restart my writing. A general equation for me would be: the more interruptions I've had while writing = the choppier my writing sounds.
- Writing is a "me" activity. It is way of expressing myself professionally or personally. So selfishly, I want/need my writing time to allow me to settle in wherever I want without distraction. If I'm right in the middle of an important thought, I begin to resent the distractor (human or not). At that moment in time, the distraction was an impediment to my train of thought.
