I used to do a lot of writing in my parents' conservatory, looking out onto the garden. As a kid I used to write song lyrics pretty much everywhere (in the garden, hammock, park, sitting up in trees...) Now it's mostly my desk in my converted loft/bedroom.
Since I seldom leave my room, I write either in the bed or in my desk. Thinking about it, I never wrote anything at all out of my bedroom
My uni has a writing studio - which is quite nice. I like to walk around when I'm writing and erm...speak to myself. If there's someone else there, I always end up getting them involved. "Hey - what if so-and-so was not in fact a vegtable-demon?". I love new environments - I can never work in my own bedroom. Never ever... Sometimes I write at my desk which is faced at a window that overlooks the ocean. But I often find myself just people watching, and drinking tea.
Really, that's where I work most often. At my PC, writing in peace and quiet with no one else to bother me, its perfect.
Really. I prefer having an office like space, surrounded by books and paper. The bedroom for me is purely for pleasure and sleep
I would prefer an office to work, but there's a massive lack of space in my home so I work where it is peaceful.
I'm curious like the cat - what are your disciplinary tactics. How the hell do you all keep focused, and eager? Motivated, and disciplined. I suffer from bouts of laziness. Each flat I've lived in, I've had to hide the TV (if we had one at all) and murder my house mates. But sadly, the interwebs is probably the biggest enemy of all! Checking one's emails about 15000 times a day. (Internet Anonymous, anyone?) So yesh, how do you get into the zone? And stay there?
I tend to write in a room other than my own. Say the spare room where there is no TV to draw my attention away. If I have no research to do I will turn off the net connection and just knuckle down. I also set time limits say three hour blocks then go and do something else for an hour or two and come back to it (when I have the time)
The best way I found is to disconnect the internet. Like you, it is way too much of a distraction for me to get anything done. I get on the internet to find the answer to a little question or do a little research and I am gone. It'll take me the better part of an hour to get back to writing. Having other people in the house is a similar distraction. I have a short attention span so I find it helpful to take my laptop to a nice cozy place outside the house. Not public but in public if you get my meaning. For example tucked away into a corner of a public gathering place. For those of us with short attention spans, there is enough going on around you to allow you to drift away from your work for a minute or two at a time to watch people but not enough to keep you away from it for much longer than that.
I do almost all of my writing totally alone. I'm usually in my room surrounded by art I've made and put on the walls and listening to my writing playlist. I have no idea why but the forest and any body of water inspires me. My mind really gets going when I go out hiking.
I usually write sitting on the couch with my laptop unless there are other people in the room. They are a distraction so I go into my room and sit on my bed. On nice days I may take it outside. Ideally, I'd have a tiny room just large enough for a table, desk, and bookshelf to minimize distractions (which I am extremely prone to).
To be honest I don't know it is not like me to stick at something like this. I just love the story and want to know what happens next most of the time. My current character is misbehaving lol And it is so much fun.
...don't need/have any... ...don't have to work at it, i just am... ...don't know what you mean by 'the zone' but if you mean wanting to write, it's just my natural state... seem to have been born with it...
oh I do have a zone makes me sound a bit like a nut job - but I have a pen name - Anya kind of writes my books for me. For me she is as much a character as Socrates or Angus from my books. I meditate and place myself as her. She dresses a bit different etc
Internet is sometimes a distraction, but more often I duck on to it while writing for research purposes. The TV is never a distraction. If it were up to me and me alone, I wouldn't even have one. Other than the odd sporting event, I can't remember the last time I HAD to watch something on TV.
I don't have a whole lot. I try to have a consistent time to write every day, though I don't always meet that goal. When I am writing, I use a full-screen text editor like WriteMonkey or FocusWriter, where I can't click over into my web browser and mess around very easily
Is it better to write scenes as they happen or can you do the main scenes first and then do the scenes that link them? For instance, you know the hero is going to have a major battle. Is it okay to do that scene and then write the scenes that get him/her there later.
I guess whatever works for you is okay. I personally find it really difficult to write out of order. I've done it, but not often. Chronologically writing stories just works better for me.
It's all down to which you're most comfortable with, but I find that writing out of order requires a lot more effort in either the planning or the editing stages, as it's very easy for continuity errors to slip in.
In what order you write your story in is completely up to you. You could evil write it from ending to begining or you could write from begining but writing the words backwards. Whatever works best for you is just fine. Personally I don't like writing my story out of order. I feel that as long as I got those great moments coming up I know I have something to aim for and sort of a personal reward.
Like some of the others if it works for you that is great. However personally writing out of order wouldn't work for me. However I don't work with a plan - sometimes I never get to the great scene or I come up with a better unexpected one along the way. A lot of my greatest story moments wouldn't exist if I wrote out of order. Only things I sometimes do early on is if I have thought of a funky scene to end with.
Never mind planning, I've found that skipping to the interesting parts means that writing the bridging stuff is just annoying. All the most boring parts come last, and all your enthusiasm was spent too fast. Now, making notes on what will come next and what is important is fine. But I like a story to have an organic feel, like, each word grows from the last. Emotionally, things grow in a way that's a lot harder to predict than events. I'd never want to write a scene that comes after another scene which might just be an emotional bridge from one thing to another, just because I like to know where I've been coming from. Also, my characters frequently mention stuff that happened before in their dialogue, and it'd feel so phoney to write a scene not knowing exactly what happened that they are referring to.
I've often toyed with the idea of writing scenes as they come to me, rather than saving them for later - I think they'd turn out better while they were fresh in my mind. I wouldn't worry about linking them all up because I enjoy twisting things to suit other things, if that makes sense, and whatever happened in the book, no matter how unrelated, I could link. But I have just edited a draft of a work in progress backwards, as in working through the last chapter, then the penultimate, then the one before that, until I come to the beginning. Sometimes if I edit from the beginning my brain switches to 'not this old thing again' mode and I feel I'm more likely to skim over stuff that needs work, if it comes up when I expect it to - but if I view the book as a series of scenes, rather than a narrative, I can edit without being distracted.
