Mind The Gaps

Last week I was busy putting the finishing touches to my book. Every time I’ve been the process of writing a chapter, it seems to be the key topic that one or more of my clients is dealing with. I know that it’s the equivalent of buy a red car and all you see is red cars but I found that because I’d just been honing my writing to deal with a specific topic, I could make it even more relevant to the next conversation and equally, it prompted me to add something to the chapter.

Anyway, that's a bit of an aside, one thing that I learned is that creativity cannot be squeezed into a neatly ordered time slot. In fact my attempts to write a chapter in a few hours failed miserably because while the content was pretty much there, it definitely needed a number of writing sessions, periods of mulling over in-between, reviews and read throughs until the final version was ready to be sent off. I also noticed that when I hit a block, the best thing to do was get up and go and do something else and then come back to it a few minutes or even a couple of hours later.

If you’ve got a similar project you’re trying to get underway – treat the gaps as being just as important as the actual writing. While the physical putting pen to paper might only take a few hours, spread it out over a few days, so that you have plenty of time to think about it, add to it, review it and read it through before you’re finished.