1. Stress on it. I know that many writing mentors will say that writers have to want to write–it defines them as writers and/or that writers write because they have no other choice. Well, I like to write, but I also like to have food in the freezer and a clean floor and money to spend. The way that writing a lot of hours every day has worked for me is to stress on it and bump it way up my list of things to do. A deadline works great for stress, even a self-imposed one like NaNoWriMo.
2. Put down the remote.
3. Turn off the internet. Be it Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, NYTimes.com, Apple rumors, or what have you, turn it off. I sometimes also turn off the phone. Once you’re distracted, for even a second, it takes precious time to get back into the writing.
4. Get up earlier. I had read about this tactic for some time (Dan Brown gets up at 4 am and writes, John Grisham wrote from 5 to 7 am) but didn’t believe it until I did it. I wasn’t particularly going to try it until daylight savings time coincided with NaNoWriMo. Of course, the corollary to Rule 4 is to go to bed earlier, for me anyway.
5. Run scared. Be it a deadline, or life changes that you don’t even know about yet, write now, because it may be all you get. Don’t warm up and don’t think about it. Sit and write.
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