If you’re working and trying to write, or if you’re trying to balance your own writing with paid writing or family commitments, you’re probably stressed. You’re trying to keep track of a thousand different responsibilities, ideas, appointments and tasks, juggle friends and family and actually have a life.

When your head is full of stuff and you constantly feel a little behind, writing suffers. I speak to writers who feel guilty all the time: women who think they should find writing easy now that they’re at home with the kids, people who have gone part-time to write, people who just can’t quite face writing after a full week at work.

We’re suffering from overwhelm, and when we don’t know if we’re coming or going we can’t clear headspace to sit down and write.

And that’s the key. You need space to write, both physical and mental. So what to do? It’s time to get some perspective and reduce your overwhelm.

Clear your head

I’ve always been interested in productivity and time management – let’s face it, I need all the help I can get – and the GTD (Getting Things Done) idea of clearing your head by dumping everything onto paper is great for writers. It’s only when you don’t have to worry about keeping track of things that you can focus your limited attention on, well, getting things done.

So do a brain dump. List every single thing you can think of that you have to do, all of your appointments, all of the big ideas you want to work on, personal things and work tasks. It might help to separate tasks into areas as you do this.

Focus on what’s relevant

Now that you know what you have to do, it’s time to manage your tasks and time. The list you’ve just made is probably terrifying.

The problem is that we tend to think about allofthethingsthatIhavetodo. Focusing on the enormity of the big picture rather than on the little steps that will get you there is a recipe for meltdown. Worrying about writing a whole novel is overwhelming. Even thinking about the next chapter might be off-putting.

Forget the novel, the screenplay, the big work project. What’s relevant and important right now is focusing on the next 15 minutes of actual work. Eat the elephant one bite at a time.

Look at your list. How many of them are big things, whole projects? Put them on another list entirely. You can take a new sheet per project and break each of these down into component parts and to-dos, but the list that you want to actually work from though is the one that contains only the next small step of any project. Make this list.

Now our immediate list is smaller but you have everything you need to remember written down for reference. You can forget everything else and just focus on the next item on your list knowing nothing is slipping through gaps.

Make it easy

Now that you have some mental space, set up the right conditions for writing. Putting yourself in a position where you’re more likely to succeed means helping yourself, making your life as easy as possible. Some of these might work for you:

• Make your workspace nice. You should enjoy spending time there.
• Set time aside in your diary/calendar for writing and to deal with other tasks that you tend to worry about so that you know they’ll get dealt with. Keep your appointments.
• Set a timer for 15 or 20 minutes and use this for writing.
• Spend time planning what you want to write about. Write a list of things you want to explore (characters, settings, ideas) and possible scenes or ideas that you can use to start you off.
• Keep a notebook and try to write down at least one idea or interesting thing each day. Go through your notebooks and old writing to highlight anything inspirational. Bring these together in a list so that you always have a file of ideas to write about.
• Give yourself time to do things you want to do, not just that you feel you should do. Tell people who question you that spending an hour in the bath is important writing work.
• Take your idea for a walk before writing and sit down at the desk as soon as you get in.
• Write when you first wake and are still a little sleepy.
• Every day before you finish, spend a minute thinking about where your writing will go next and write the first sentence of tomorrow’s work.

These are ideas that I find useful, but of course I don’t have all the answers. What do you do to keep you writing when your head’s ready to burst?

I meant the place when I typed that sentence, but thinking about it I mean the residential retreats too. I’ve felt a bit silly about the fact that they bring me such joy – after all I spend most of my time cooking and looking after other people. But then I dug out something I wrote early in 2008 before starting Urban Writers’ about what mattered to me and how I wanted life to look. I wanted my life and work to be filled with creativity and writing. Someone once said I was a facilitator, and back in 2008 I decided I wanted to nurture people and bring happiness to them by helping them do the thing they love most. And somehow that’s exactly what I’ve got.

The view from the front rooms at the residential retreat

How could you not love countryside like this? Especially when it’s the view from your window when you wake up. We got back from the March Devon retreat a week ago and I wanted to share a little bit of it with you.

I’ll share a pic of the writing room once I have permission from the writers, but rest assured we had a productive time. We finished sitcoms, started new film scripts, straightened plot kinks and wrote thousands upon thousands of words. There was even a, ‘By Jove, I’ve got it!’ moment (a vastly underused phrase, in my opinion). It was ace.

And between words we had long lunches with interesting people,

Spring green soup and yummy salad

took walks up the hill into Dartmoor

View up the hill from the back staircase

And ate cake.

Gluten-free honey cake

I can’t wait to do it all again - if you want to join us, we’ve over half full already.

Top takeaway? Schedule time to write with breaks and create accountability so that you’re not just relying on willpower.

My favourite tip is to accept that you WILL procrastinate. It’s no good thinking you’ll do what you should when you should, you have to accept that you are likely to procrastinate and find a workaround in advance.

I only just remembered to take a photo before it all went!

Now, I’m quite into herby sweet things and had been wondering about a rosemary cake for some time. I figured that if lemon and rosemary works in savoury food it should work in sweet too. And it did. This cake has a subtle rosemary flavour and is prettily flecked, which you can’t really see in the photos (I lost my phone for ages… in my pocket). Cooking mellows the rosemary’s medicinal backnote and the lemon-sharpness is intensified by drizzling the hot cake with syrup then filling it with lemon curd.

I’d love just a touch more rosemary flavour, but think it has the right amount of rosemary flecks as it is. If you put your rosemary in the sugar the night before I think you’d add the right amount of subtle, aromatic depth. Just take it out and chop up when you start to make the cake. In fact, I might just make a jar of rosemary sugar in case I want to cook with it again.

This is a sponge base, and although I’ve given weights, I always weigh my eggs in their shells then use the same weight of flour, butter and sugar. This is a much easier way of working out the right weight and the only way I can remember how to make sponge without a recipe…

For the cake and syrup:

3 medium eggs (room temp)

175g caster sugar plus 1-2 tbsp

175g soft unsalted butter

175 self-raising flour

1tbsp finely chopped fresh rosemary plus 2 large sprigs (or whatever’s left if you’re buying a packet)

2 lemons, zested

Now, if I’m honest, I didn’t weigh my icing ingredients. I also made it with water rather than butter, but think a butter icing would be better.

For the icing/filling:

250g icing sugar

75g unsalted butter (whatever’s left from your packet after making the cake)

1 tbsp honey

1/2 jar good lemon curd

Cake batter. Yum.

Method:

1. Heat your oven to gas mark 3, 160C, and grease and line 2 round cake tins (I used 8 inches – if you want a taller cake use a 7 inch tin or add another egg and adjust the flour/butter/sugar weights until they each equal the weight of your 4 eggs with their shells on).

2. Cream the butter and sugar until it’s soft, pale and fluffy.

2. Beat the eggs together and add veeeeeeery slooooooooowly to the mix, adding a little flour after the first third or so. If you’re using an electric mixer just leave the motor running and pour gently.

3. Add the lemon, rosemary and flour. Fold in gently, adding a splash of milk at the end to get a soft dropping consistency.

4. Divide the mixture between the tins. I don’t think you need to spread sponge mix out, it normally levels itself out in the oven, but I like to spread mine out with a shallow dent in the middle to prevent a domed top (the low oven temperature will also help prevent an uneven rise).

5. While the cake is cooking, make your syrup. Juice your lemons and put in a pan with the tablespoon of sugar (I’ve suggested caster sugar because that’s what I had out, but you can use icing sugar or anything other sugar you have knocking about) and the remaining rosemary. Bring to a simmer and allow it to cook gently for as long as possible. For extra rosemary power you could actually do this step before starting the cake or even the day before.

6. Bake for  at least 20 minutes, or preferably 25 before checking. My cakes needed 35 minutes, but my oven is a bit temperamental. It’s done when it springs back if you touch it with your finger, and it will also smell different when it’s ready – like freshly baked cake, oddly enough!

7. Poke it all over with a knife or skewer and gently spoon your syrup over the whole surface of both cakes. Leave them to cool in the tin for 15 minutes then remove (gently, the syrup will have made the sponge delicate) onto a wire cooling rack.

8. Once they’re cool, sandwich the cakes together with a nice fat layer of lemon curd.

9. Sieve your icing sugar and beat (gently at first!) with the other icing ingredients. You can always add more lemon curd or icing sugar if the texture isn’t quite right. Feel free to tinker until you get something you like. This amount of icing will give you a generous topping, or if stretched you could probably ice the top and centre with it instead of using lemon curd in the middle.

10. Make a cup of tea, put your feet up, and enjoy it with a slice of cake.

Here’s how 

1.  Write a short paragraph telling me your biggest writing problem at the moment and what it is that you dream of writing. Make me laugh, make me root for you, tell me whatever you like, just make sure it’s 150 words or less. (There’s no penalty for shorter answers!)

2. Post your entry on your blog, website or facebook account, and with it include a link to this page: http://tinyurl.com/bootcomp. (suggestion: you could write at the bottom of your post ‘This is my entry to win an online writing bootcamp from Urban Writers’ Retreat - http://tinyurl.com/bootcomp‘).

3. Let me know about your entry by pasting a weblink to your entry in the comments below. You must complete this step for your entry to count.

If you don’t have a blog/site/facebook, you can just write your answer in the comments below.

Social Media Bonus

You can also get bonus points by linking to http://tinyurl.com/bootcomp on Twitter using the #getwriting hashtag.

What you should know (my competition, my rules!)

Written entries must be under 150 words with no minimum word limit.

The competition closes at 20:00 (London, UK time) on Sunday 17th March 2013.

You can enter from anywhere in the world as the bootcamp runs online.

The prize is a place on my 4 week online Get Writing! bootcamp, running from Monday 1st April-Sunday 28th April 2013. It cannot be swapped for anything else, though you can give it to another writer as a gift if you like.

If the winner has already booked on the bootcamp, I’ll refund their money. Whether someone has already joined the bootcamp will have no bearing on my decision.

I will pick the entry that I like best. I get to choose who wins for any reason.

By entering, you agree to publicity (including but not limited to your name in my newsletter – I’ll contact you for approval if there’s anything else).

I’ll announce the winner in my newsletter on Friday 22nd March 2013.

Ready? Set. Go!

I’d been running writing retreats for a couple of years already but was feeling stifled and ready to give them up. I wasn’t writing at all, which was contributing to my bad feelings about the retreats. I was dissatisfied with my job and the way my life was going in general and I wasn’t willing to pay for help because I felt like a bit of a hopeless case, like I wasn’t trying hard enough so I didn’t deserve it.

There was a choice. There’s always a choice. You either accept the way things are, accept being miserable, or you choose to look for ways of changing, both your situation and the way you look at life.

Fast forward two years. I’ve said for years that my perfect life would include working for a company I like one day a week for stability and then spend the rest of my time on writing and running my own business. I wanted to travel and to feel, if not confident, at least brave enough to take risks.

Playing with word pictures

Almost exactly a year ago I finally got the courage to leave a stable job with a prestigious company. I loved the company but not the job, and it was time to follow my dreams. I spent 3 months in Bali where I completed the first draft of a novel and ran an online bootcamp, I ran my first residential retreat and I’m nearly half way through another novel draft. It’s been a very difficult year in some respects (*coughfinancesprocrastinationcough*) and I’ve got a long way to go, but I feel creatively fulfilled and in control. I love running the writing retreats and meeting you brilliant people and last week I got offered freelance work one day a week with my old company (I said I loved them, right?).

I wouldn’t change this life for the world, but it hasn’t magically appeared overnight. It’s been a very long process of just putting one foot in front of the other, but there are a couple of things that have acted as springboards for change, one of which is the 30 Day Challenge (for more see the bottom of the page). It’s where 200 or so people from around the world come together for a month to PLAY and to create something they weren’t quite sure they could manage in a month. I’ve used the process to rediscover my love for the retreats, to set up blogs and websites and to create art.

I haven’t decided what to do for March yet, whether to boost my writing or create something entirely different, but I can’t wait. Doing something genuinely fun is liberating and helped me to see that that I didn’t have to make life so hard for myself and actually if I wanted to write, travel run my own business, I could just do it. It might not be easy, but it’s all figure-out-able. It’s ok to want the things you want rather than the ‘sensible’ stuff and to go for it.

Then John, who runs SWLP and the 30 Day Challenge, said he’d give me a £40 discount to offer you. Thanks, John! Go and read through the details and see what you think. The challenge might not be for you, or maybe you aren’t sure you’re willing to commit the time and effort at the moment. If it’s for you though, you’ll already know that you need to do something to change. You’ll read it and you’ll know this is right, that you want it.

If you’re thinking of joining us I just want to warn you, the price goes up at 10pm tonight. The full price is £297, but at the moment it’s £187.

With my discount, it’s a much more affordable £147.

To take advantage, look for the big yellow Add To Cart button on the 30 Day Challenge page. Now look just underneath it for the silver single payment button. Click on that button, enter URBANWRITERS in the promo code box and hit apply. The new price of £147 should show up. This won’t work if you choose the split payment option, sorry.

Join the 30 Day Challenge here

If you decide to join later, my code should still work but I’m not sure how quickly the price will go up in the final few days.

And if it’s not for you this time but you want to change your life for the better? Try Marie Forleo, lovely Selina Barker, Free Range Humans and Suzy Greaves. If you want to really dedicate yourself to improving your writing, take a class or even apply for an MA. Or grab a friend and set your own challenge for March. Just do something! If you join though, let me know so I can come and say hi.

Playing with sand. This pretty well sums up how I feel about life right now.

(This is an affiliate link, meaning I will get a commission when people book through me. You can tell this is a genuine recommendation by the fact that I’ll be joining the challenge too, and by using my link you get £40 off. I think that counts as a win all round.)

You go to bed one night pleased with your progress, wake up the next morning and everything’s vanished. All the ideas and the enthusiasm, all the good things you feel for your characters. Gone. You plough on regardless, but over the coming days you feel less and less engaged with your writing, less sure of the plot, less close to the characters. Then you make the mistake of reading back over the last few days and, well, after reading that nonsense it’s clear that there’s not much point in carrying on, is there?

I tend to be a splurge writer and avoid looking back or editing until it’s all out. I envy people who take a more considered approach whenever I see the horrendous mess I’ve produced, but looking backwards always causes me to stall.

Or so I thought, until I discovered a new trick, courtesy of my e-reader.

Now, on a Kindle, and I assume the same will be true of most e-readers, you can email documents to yourself to read. If you have a Kindle this will mean going into ‘Personal Document Settings’ in the Kindle area of your Amazon account and registering your email address (to prevent spam, Kindles only receive email from authorised addresses).

If you’re using Word, just email your Word document to Kindle’s email address, which you’ll find on that document settings page on Amazon. This is only for you to read so you don’t need to worry about formatting too much, though separating chapters with headers and line/page breaks might make it easier to read.

If you use Scrivener, click the ‘compile’ button in the middle of the toolbar at the top and select a Microsoft Word format. You can format e-books properly in here but our aim is to just get a quick and readable copy onto your e-reader so Microsoft Word will do.

Now read it on your e-reader. Your partial draft will be pretty bad. In parts it will be awful. That’s ok. You’re not reading it to judge or edit it, you’re reading to get to know it again, to remember why the story excited you and which bits you loved writing.

Of course, you could have just done this by reading the document on your computer, but it’s the psychological effect of reading it on an e-reader that holds the magic here. Because you associate your e-reader with reading, well, actual books, that’s exactly what you start to see your garbled mass of words as. You’re reading it as though it were an actual book already, which means it must be possible for it to someday become an actual book, right? Seeing it as a real book makes you take it seriously. You’ll find plenty of mistakes and things to deal with when editing (for example, I appear to have written the same scene twice at different points in the plot) but you’ll also see the bones of a real, finished novel emerge and be able to see how to get there. This isn’t just some pile of rubbish you’ve been wrestling with, this is your book. This is important.

If you don’t have an e-reader, by the way, you can just print your work out. To get that OMG this is going to be a book! effect I suggest printing it double-sided in book/booklet format, which you can do in Word. Unless you’re more talented at printing the right way round than I am, perhaps test it on a small amount of pages first though…

One caveat: you must be capable of accepting the current flawed state of your writing for this to work. If you expect perfection from yourself on the first attempt you’ll just cry. Embrace the messiness of a first draft though, and you’ll rediscover your reasons for wanting to write this story. More than that, you’ll find yourself actually wanting to write, and if you’ve been stuck in the doldrums of a novel for a while then you’ll know what a relief that is.

Did it work for me? I have more than one abandoned first draft in my files, put it that way. This time I’d almost given up and had turned my attention to another project. But now I’m back and writing it again. It feels good.

It doesn’t matter how good you are as a writer, or if you have ‘hidden talent’. As someone who kept my own talent hidden away from public eyes, I know that hidden talent means nothing if people can’t respond to it.

The only way to get better at writing… is to put your fears aside. You thought I was going to say ‘write more’, didn’t you? And what might you be afraid of? Not that people will hate it, but what will happen if they like it. I’m willing to bet that sounds familiar.

When I started blogging back in 2005, my biggest fear was that people would see what I’d written and like it. Or be rude about it. That anyone would respond at all. However, as I continued to blog, offering up cold hard opinions nobody asked for on a range of topics, I grew bolder.

But what to write?
Accept it: your very first blog post will be rubbish. Every new blog I’ve ever read has started with a tentative ‘Helloooo…? Is anyone there?’ type of post. I know this offends the very core of our sensibilities as writers because as Writers we Know What We Want To Say, but I’d argue that it’s an essential trip back in time, to the first time you wrote a story. In my case I was four, and that story was about my sister, her boyfriend, and the family cat (I still have it). Going back to the beginning and rediscovering a process keeps your ego in check.

Twitter. Why?
Twitter’s still a bone of contention for those who think that it’s just a hangout for attention-seekers; like that’s a bad thing. I love Twitter because I get to have serious and silly conversations with friends and strangers alike – hold on, did I just suggest a way of finding new characters and inspiration for dialogue and storylines?

Learning to refine my thoughts into 140 characters has been one of the single best things I’ve ever done. I write emails and content, and outside of work it’s all short stories, a novel, and currently a script. My writing has more impact than it ever did, because as with short-form writing, every single word and punctuation mark counts.

When you set up your blog, set up a twitter account. Use it to publicise your blog. More importantly, use it to build relationships in-between shameless blog pimpings so you have an audience who’ll actually read the thing.

If you don’t feel the need to share your every thought on Twitter, then it’s not for you; that’s OK. There’s still loads of ways you can get your blog read. Or maybe you don’t want a huge audience, so it’s a nice way of getting feedback on your work from a select few. That’s the beauty of blogging – it’s entirely your own thing, done your way.

Write It. Publish it. Er, That’s It
Seeing your words on a page, with – gasp – no middleman or editor to shape them, is incredibly liberating. Having grown up with the traditional ‘write, submit, wait, be rejected or accepted by someone else’ paradigm, complete control is rather disconcerting at first. Now, I heartily flick the V to waiting for someone else’s approval. I think I just drew a parallel with LIFE there…

The downside is that you won’t see all the typos and grammatical mistakes you’ve made until after you’ve published, but that’s OK because you can edit it as much as you like. And yes, you’re still a good and worthy writer if you make mistakes with spelling and phrasing.

That process I talked about earlier? You’re watching it in action. This is where your writing gets better, and your cringe reflex will become less reactive over time. In any case, it’s only blogging. Relax and enjoy, and see where it leads…

Sometimes though, it’s too much. There are no life dramas or plot problems to unknot and the early-morning mental vomit, inevitably grouchy in tone, feels whiny,  self-indulgent and pointless. I don’t want to listen to my half-awake brain grumbling about getting up, but without Morning Pages I miss the rush of energy that comes from a breakthrough and the internal calm as I put my pen down.

So instead, I’ve been writing just a little every morning recently, but writing fiction instead (one of the common misconceptions of Morning Pages is that it must be fiction. Not true. It’s a mental purge that allows space for creativity later in the day and can take any form). Just 5 little minutes of escape into my imagination.

And you know what? It’s brilliant. it’s the mental equivalent of doing a few sun salutations and sit-ups before work. I feel perkier all day because I’ve already achieved something – it’s 8am and I’ve already done some writing, take THAT boring Tuesday! – and more creative, more likely to want to write later on.

I’ve tried to write fiction as soon as I wake before, but trying to force my way a tricky patch of novel before a cup of tea is always disastrous. Turns out I was taking the wrong approach. All I needed was one little thing. What is it?

Ah, that’s for next week. For now though, let me leave you with this, a little something to help you test whether it works for you. Tonight, put a pen and notepad next to your bed. Write at the top ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’. When you wake tomorrow, grab the pen and write for 5 minutes without stopping.

Then step into the shower with a smug smile on your face.

This picture, by the way, was made at a Turnbull Grey workshop. They’re great. I liked it so much I went back for more.