What do dragon's, dodo's and writer's block have in common?

There's no such creatures.

I worked as a film critic for a UK national newspaper for eight years and never once missed a weekly deadline. How? Well, keep reading and I'll share my magic trick with you.

(BTW you can check out my reviews here if you wish/are bored/interested in films) Here

I had to watch movies on Monday and Tuesday and write my reviews - up to five a week - to file them before midnight on the same Tuesday in order that the sub-editors and page artists could do their magic. The completed page would be returned to me on Wednesday evening or Thursday morning for a quick once over and then late that same Thursday the page would be sent to print to land on doorsteps and in newsagents the next day.

How is it possible to do this? What special magic formula did I use or magic spell did I cast to write to these deadlines? Oh by the way, I had other tasks to do as well - very few people - if any - in national newspapers have the luxury of just writing film reviews.

And sometimes I'd be given extra writing tasks to do. For example, at lunchtime an editor might casually say, 'We need 1,000 words on the top 50 male movie stars of all time. And we need it by evening conference at 6pm. Can you do it?'

They're not actually asking. It's a demand, an order, they're just being polite by phrasing it that way. And the only permissible answer is, 'Yes, of course.'

I mean, I could answer 'no', but I loved being a film reviewer and the quickest way to be an ex-film reviewer is to say no to work.

So how did I manage to do all this? Come closer and I'll tell you.

The secret to never missing a weekly deadline is organisation. And fear of not getting paid. But mostly organisation.

And if you want to write a review, a game, a book, a gamebook, a script, a weather report or anything - you have to be organised.  And your brain has a writing muscle. It really does. And like all muscles it will get stronger with regular exercise.

1 

 Have a dedicated time to write. Start small at first. Ten minutes a day for the first week will do it, then build it up by five minutes a day the next week, then twenty minutes a day the week after and so on until you're writing for an hour a day.

You'll be surprised how much you can write in ten minutes if that's all you have. By the time you've built up to an hour you'll be writing reams of words.

2

The ten minute task. The medium you use doesn't matter - paper, computer, voice recording, vellum, parchment, whatever. Sit yourself down with no distractions and write. Set a timer on your phone and write.

Write constantly. Write like a genius, Write drivel. Write like all the demons of hell are chasing you. When the alarm goes off, stop writing. Don't read your words for at least an hour.

3

Go back and read your words. Now rewrite them, but - and this is important - don't spend longer rewriting than you actually did writing the words in the first place. I'll write a separate post on editing later.

4

You don't have to write chronologically. If you have a scene/section/passage that is proving tricky, move on, write a later scene. Write a scene about an asteroid crashing into planet earth.

(That's my go to scene to write when I'm stuck and I've written it a thousand different ways and something good and/or useful always comes out of it. even, and often especially if asteroids have nothing to do with whatever it is I'm writing.)

Why not invent a new character and describe them, write a some dialogue for them. You may never use it, but it's far more important to spend your precious ten minutes writing anything than it is to be not writing.

5

Set a minimum word count to achieve in your ten minutes and increase your word count as you increase your writing time. Ten minutes allows you to write 100 words as a minimum. An hour's writing time allows you to write 600 words as a minimum. Feel free to write more. But a hundred words a day should be the least you can do.

6

You can't edit what you haven't written. So remember your ABC.

Always Be Composing.

Recap:

Lock yourself away and write ferociously for ten minutes every day. every day.

This is how I wrote my gamebook Nemo's Fury, and my game, Game of Runes, you can play for free, click the link below.

http://tinyurl.com/GameOfRunes