Whether you’re recovering from illness, worn out after a long shift at the day job, or simply not maintaining energy levels the way you did when you were younger, every writer faces periods of low energy.
That said, if you want to continue to make consistent progress on your writing, you need to develop strategies for combating those low-energy days.
In this episode of the Writing Coach Podcast, I identify several techniques you can use to maintain the momentum of your writing even when you’re lacking inspiration, battling brain fog, or are just feeling downright exhausted.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #141 Show Notes
Get Kevin’s FREE book: NOVEL ADVICE: MOTIVATION, INSPIRATION, AND CREATIVE WRITING TIPS FOR ASPIRING AUTHORS.
The Writing Coach Episode #141 Transcript
Hello beloved listeners and welcome back to the Writing Coach podcast. It’s your host as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
It is October, of course, the best month of the year. We’ve got Halloween, we’ve got the trees, the leaves turning red. I absolutely love autumn. I mean, how can you not? Everyone’s got their cool fall coats on and their pumpkin spice lattes in hand here in Ottawa. Let me tell you, we get this short, beautiful autumn, and then it’s a nightmare hellscape of winter for like the next eight months. So if I sound overly enthusiastic about October, you know why? In Ottawa from basically November until April, you know, anytime you get in a car, you always kind of have to say, Okay, you know, I, I might die in a horrible car crash, You know that that black ice might come outta nowhere and get me.
So, you know, I think that the fall season is a wonderful time to enjoy life. Well, you can before winter crushes down on you. I think another one of the reasons I’m, I’m enjoying myself right now is we are a week into story plan intensive. My big free story planning program. We had almost 200 people sign up for this round, which is really wonderful. Got an awesome group of folks in the group coaching component of it, and just loving everyone so far. It’s so much fun to watch people, you know, go through the program and made success, make success, make success, find the success. Oh boy, Normally it’s the end of the episode when my words start failing me. We’re in trouble. If I’m stumbling this early in, maybe that’s a sign that I should just get to the content. I guess I should give some pitch of some kind, Tell you what I’ll tell you about my free book, Novel Advice: Motivation, Inspiration, and Creative Writing Tips for Aspiring Authors. Head on over to www.kevintjohns.com, and you could pick up your free copy of that book there.
Now, today’s podcast is inspired by a conversation I had with a one-on-one client of mine this week. He caught c last week. He’d been, he’d avoided it this far which was great, but, unfortunately, he went to a concert last week and came down with Covid a day or two later and wasn’t feeling so hot. But luckily he’s mostly over it, and he’s on the mend. And so we were talking a bit this week about what to do when you’re feeling low energy. How can you tackle your writing work if you’re not feeling super great or super energized or super inspired? And this is actually something I face all the time because on any given day I’ve got thousands of words of people’s content to review.
And you know, not always am I a hundred percent eager and ready to go. So what I’ve done is I’ve developed a lot of techniques to ease myself into the editorial process, and they apply to the writing process just as well. And I would say one of the very first things you want to do in order to combat low energy is to create a regular writing habit. You’ve probably heard me talk about it before. Non-Negotiable writing time. Get your writing scheduled into your calendar because what is going to happen is your body and your subconscious are going to take over. They’re going to ingrain that habit into the neurology of your mind, and you won’t need the motivation to get working. Your body, your mind will say, Oh, it’s Wednesday at 7:00 PM this is when I write. And you sit down and you do it. There are tons of great books on habit formation and one of them I remember talking about a man, I think he got like a spike through his brain or something, and he forgot everything about himself and his life.
And yet he used to go for this long, complicated daily walk around his neighbourhood. And after his brain injury where he couldn’t remember anything about his life, they realized he could still go on that walk. He could do this complicated route through his neighbourhood, his body and his brain remembered it even when it didn’t remember anything else. That’s the power of habit. You could fall back on the subconscious rather than having to rely on being consciously energized to do your creative work.
Now that said, we are all tired sometimes. We all have busy days. How do we ease ourselves into the writing or editorial process when we’re feeling low energy? One of my techniques, actually, regardless of how I’m feeling, is I have the scene that I want to review, read back to me by Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word has a text-to-voice macro. I certainly have that turned on.
And so rather than even using the energy of reading, I sit back, and I have the piece of content, whether it’s my own writing or whether my client’s writing read back to me by the computer, and I’m able to get this sort of distanced big picture view of the scene. And inevitably I’ll have a couple of big-picture thoughts about the scene. Then when I sit down and start going over the scene again, this time reading it line by line, I already have some concepts in mind in terms of what can be improved. And all of a sudden the line-by-line stuff starts popping out at me, and suddenly I’m into the groove. And so what you see here is I’m starting macro, I’m starting big picture. What do I like about the scene? What do I not like about it? Then I’m easing my way into the line-by-line stuff, and I think that’s a great way, especially when you’re feeling low energy, to not just dive into a sentence-by-sentence review and say, Oh, is this sentence good enough?
So if I’m feeling super low energy, if I’m feeling brain cloud or not in my mindset to get a lot of editorial work done, I pull up one of those programs, and I run the scene I need to review through a program, and I’ll start simple. I’ll start something simple as fixing typos or fixing grammatical mistakes or removing words that are repeated too often. And again, I’m not even using my own brain power to do this. I’m using the software. But again, like that macro to micro level approach, it gets you started, it gets the ball rolling, and then suddenly you’re having thoughts, you’re having ideas, you’re seeing ways to take the scene and make it better. And so the simple use of software and technology, it doesn’t solve your editorial issues. You know, auto crit isn’t gonna edit a scene for you, but it is going give you different reports, different lenses through which to view a scene.
Look at the big picture, and then allow yourself to kind of get into the groove and work your way down into the line-by-line stuff.
Another surprisingly helpful technique that I find is running the scene through some software. So there are lots of different options for this. There’s a free app called Hemingway that will identify wordy sentences and highlight different sentences and give you some simple advice perhaps about how to simplify or clarify them. There’s Grammarly, the great editorial tool. It’s kind of like your Microsoft Word, spell check and grammar check, check on hyperdrive. I certainly use that all over the place. And then you’re getting into more complicated tools like AutoCrit, which is one I’m subscribed to in that I use a fair bit. There is also Pro Writing Aid and other tools like this out there, but what these things will do is, let’s say Autocrit for example, it’ll give you tons of different reports, but like on the most simple level, it will identify perhaps words that have been repeated too often in a scene.
And then once you’re doing that, it happens every time it happens, it’s like going to the gym, you don’t wanna go, you force yourself to go, you’re feeling low energy, you start out slow, and then all of a sudden somewhere through that workout you’re like, Oh, this is feeling good, and I’m having fun. And it’s the same way with writing and with editing as well. Another technique I use is my 20 questions checklist. This was something I created for a seminar I taught last year, which was called How to Know If Your Writing Is Good: A Game of 20 Questions. And what I often say is that masterpieces, there’s no formula for them, but there are formulas for good to great writing. And so if you’re struggling to figure out what’s working, what’s not in a scene that you’re editing, it’s great to be able to pull out this 20-question checklist that I’ve created and just go over the scene answering simple questions like, is the opening as strong as it can be? Does the scene end with a cliffhanger that makes the reader want to keep turning pages? So again, it’s a great way to get started looking at some little things and then inevitably the juices start flowing, and you get right to it.
One final tip that I’ll give you here is when you do have low energy, but you have say some inspiration, follow the energy, and this becomes a lot easier when you’re in the revisions process. What am I talking about? Well, when you are drafting the first draft, I largely recommend that you do it chronologically that you write scenes one through ten, act one, and then scenes one through ten, act two, as opposed to hopping around all over the place. Certainly, you can hop around and go back and fill in gaps and whatnot, but for the most part, when you’re writing a first draft, you’re kind of just chugging ahead, going through it chronologically.
And so regardless of kind of where your energy or inspiration is at, you need to write that next scene, and that next thing needs to get written at some point and might as well take a stab at it now. But that’s just that first draft. Once you’re into the revisions process, there’s no rule, there’s no requirement that you go in chronological order. If you feel like editing Act three, scene two today, go for it. If that’s where your energy’s taking you, or if you have one scene that you know you need to completely rewrite, stripped down, build back up and revise, and you have another scene that you know you just need some minor tweaks you need to make to it, well, on a low energy day, go make the minor tweaks instead of having to do the heavy lifting of rewriting an entire scene, save that for the day for when you’re feeling energized and good.
All right, so we all get covid sometimes. We all get sick, and we all get tired. We’ve got a lot of things that are demanding our energy. So what we’ve gone over today in this episode are some different things that you could do to continue to make progress on your book, even when you’re feeling low energy. One, create that habit. Create that regular writing schedule so that your brain and your body take over the work for you more than your inspiration. Start by looking at things at the macro level, the big picture. Have the computer read the scene to you. Then work your way down into the micro line-by-line editing and writing. Use the software that’s out there available to you, whether it’s Grammarly or Hemingway app or Auto Crit. These tools are there to help us and they can, and they can especially help us when we’re feeling low energy use tools created by folks like myself, Like my 20 questions checklist to ask yourself simple questions and answer them about the scene. The questions are already there for you. You don’t need to use energy to come up with them.
And if you want access to that 20 questions checklist, that’s one of the tools I provide my writing clients with my one-on-one clients and my group coaching clients. If you’re interested at all in learning about my one-on-one coaching or my group programs, head on over to www.kevintjohns.com. You can get my free book there, novel advice, get on my mailing list, you’ll get updates, information news about when I’m opening the gates to different programs and we can if you want to schedule a time to chat, you and I can do a consultation call and talk about what it is you need in order to support your goals as a writer. All right, my friends, I have so much story plan homework to review. People are sending it in already. It’s Saturday. I’ve already given a handful of homework assignments to review. I better get to that. I can’t wait to do it. I hope you are making great progress on your writing as well this weekend, whether or not you’re in the program. That’s it for this week. Remember to hit subscribe and I will see you on the next episode of The Writing Coach.
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