18 Tips to Keep the Words Flowing

As a novelist, I don’t outline. If I’m lucky, I know what will happen in the next chapter or two. Sometimes I don’t even know that much. Despite having written 10 crime novels in 12 years, I often find myself stuck.

(Search for a Better Writing Process.)

To keep the momentum going, I have had to invent (or steal) a number of simple methods to get started each day and keep moving my writing project forward over time. Some are straightforward techniques, but more of them fall under the category of Jedi Mind Tricks—ways to fool a worse version of myself into being a better version. For me, and many other writers I know, the problem isn’t the story I’m telling. It’s my inability to get out of my own way and keep telling it.

First the basics: Turn off your phone. I’m a pretty extreme example, setting my phone to Do Not Disturb 20 hours per day, with only a few people on the exceptions list. To make it easier, I often put my phone in another room when I am writing, so I’m not tempted to pick it up. I know that not everyone has the ability to disconnect. Before I became a full-time author, I ran a business, writing six books on my lunch hour with my phone ringing and dinging beside me. Trust me, writing everything from an email to a novel is much easier without the distractions. The science on the subject says that it can take 20 minutes to relocate your focus after an interruption. (And yes, the science agrees that multi-tasking is not a real thing.)

Maybe this is the point to mention that good writing takes time. Most writers have day jobs, not to mention important non-negotiable stuff like partners, kids, parents, etc. To make time to write that book, you’re going to have to give up some stuff you like to make writing possible. Stuff like TV, video games, social media, making sourdough, and other optional activities. Most people have a lot of trouble with this one. “But I like TV,” they say. “I can’t live without TikTok,” they say. My reply is this: “In ten years, which will be a bigger disappointment—skipping a few hours of TV/TikTok/Candy Crush or not writing your novel?”

Getting started every day is a challenge, because I am a champion procrastinator. So I have a note on my laptop reminding me to just open the document to the beginning of the previous day’s work. I’m not required to write, but I don’t get to do anything else. After a few minutes of staring at what I wrote the day before, I’ll notice an awkward phrase to fix, then a sentence that needs repair, then a paragraph or two to tweak, and before long, I’m back in the groove. (I stole this idea from an old NPR interview with children’s author Daniel Pinkwater—it really works.)

I also try to write in chunks. Research on creativity has found that most people can work on a project for about 90 minutes before needing a break. At first I thought this was bunk—I’m a Midwesterner, I can outwork anyone!—until I started to watch the clock and track my own rhythms. Turns out, at 90 minutes, I find myself standing up, stretching, then doing something mindless like emptying the dishwasher or taking out the trash. Anything to get the blood flowing to my brain. A few minutes later, I’m back at my desk for the next 90 minutes.

Next, as Lady Macbeth said, screw your courage to the sticking place. For me, writing can be a little scary. With every book, I’m putting my whole self into the world in a very real, intimate, and vulnerable way. But vulnerability is the special sauce of good writing—you have to expose yourself, to put your emotions into the work, even if it’s through the veil of fiction. If you want to write well, you can’t avoid this. It’s the price of admission. Hence the required courage.

Similarly, I tend to get wrapped around my own axle when I think about writing for an audience, all those people who have read my earlier books. So I try to write for a specific person—an audience of one. For me, that’s my wife, Margret, who is also my first reader. But you can pick anyone you like—maybe it’s your mom, or your best friend. Maybe it’s the teacher who encouraged you to write when you were younger, or a writer you’ve never met but whose work really speaks to you. Or maybe you’re simply writing to entertain and edify yourself. What matters is that you’re writing for someone you trust.

Just write a bad book. This is a big one for me. I’m a recovering perfectionist, and it’s hard for me to write the first paragraphs and pages of anything—because it’s never good enough. So I tell myself to just write a bad book. And that gets me to lower my defenses enough to start moving the story forward. By the time it goes to press, the book is always better than I could have imagined from those lousy opening paragraphs.  

Another perfectionism hack is to write in all caps. For me, the problem often comes when I lean into “trying to write something good.” Weirdly, hitting Caps Lock lowers the stakes. It doesn’t look like finished writing, which both helps me work faster and makes writing feel more like play, which is the ultimate goal. At the end of the day, I convert everything into sentence case, which makes it easier to tune up my sentences and paragraphs the next morning.

To help myself with dialogue, I skip the quotation marks until the end of my writing session. Not only do I write faster, but without the obvious delineation between speech and narrative, I’m forced to make speech distinctive enough to stand out as such.

If I can’t decide on a word or phrase—I often find myself switching back and forth, like Flaubert with his comma—I put them in brackets and move on. When I go back to revisit them weeks later, the choice is usually clear.

I also frequently find myself coming up with changes for chapters I’ve already written, everything from minor character notes to major plot points. Jumping back to revise is a great way to derail the day’s work. Instead, I drop an all caps note into the text. Sometimes these ideas are useful, even crucial, but an embarrassing number are actually pretty dumb. Leaving them until it’s time for revisions has saved me from hours of rewrites that I will later have to re-rewrite.

When I don’t know what happens next, I stop trying to write a book. Instead, I write about the book, about what happens next, in the abstract, in plain English. This allows me to work through multiple different ideas and clarify decisions with little risk, effort, or self-judgement. I think of it like being a horseman in a wild landscape, ranging widely ahead of the wagon train to find the best path forward. If I can find the right mindset, I soon find myself telling the story again—and that’s how I know I picked the right path.

If I’m really stuck, I go for a nature walk, always without headphones, to allow my mind to unspool with nothing specific to capture my attention. A city street with decent trees will do the job, but a park or nature trail is better if you have one close by. Research has repeatedly shown the deep links between exercise in nature and increased creativity. Exercise improves blood flow to the brain, and time spent in nature is simultaneously relaxing and energizing.

When I walk, sometimes I’m trying to solve a specific problem, and sometimes I have no idea what the problem is. Regardless, I don’t actively try to solve things. I just keep my feet moving and let my mind wander while my subconscious does the work. More often than not, the answer appears before I reach the end of my walk.

When the problem doesn’t solve itself, I ask myself, is this a Book Problem or a Nick Problem? (Margret, my wife, came up with this one.) A Book Problem might be a wrong turn I’ve taken with the story, or a mistake with a character choice—and my subconscious won’t let me move ahead until I’d changed course. A Nick Problem is internal, like self-doubt, sleep deprivation, or overwhelm from (for example) planning my upcoming book tour. Knowing the category of the problem can help me determine where to direct my attention for a solution.

Sometimes I get stuck on a specific scene, even though I know what comes after it. Usually this is because I know what the scene is supposed to accomplish—what character and story work needs to happen—but I can’t figure out how to do that. In cases like these, I make an all caps note, then skip the problem scene and move to the next thing I know how to write. (I got this advice from two different writers, C.J. Box and Don Bentley.) Usually, after a chapter or two, the solution comes to me, and I can either go back and write the scene or just write a longer all caps note and keep powering ahead.

When the book stalls out completely and I can’t find a way forward, I’ve learned to consider that I might not have one problem, but several interrelated problems. Through that lens, I simply grab a pen and paper and write a list of all the things that are bugging me about the book. What don’t I know? What isn’t quite working? Once I get started, I discover a lot of things that have been nagging me subconsciously. And with the list written by hand, it’s much easier to see the connections and find an overarching solution. Over the years, I’ve found that the hardest part is identifying the problems. The solutions usually follow quickly.

If all else fails, I go back to the beginning of the manuscript and read what I’ve already written. This reminds me of what I’ve been trying to do and the steps I’ve taken to get there. The book is often better than I’ve given myself credit for, which helps with the self-doubt. As I read, I take the time to clean it up, incorporating (or deleting) all the little notes I’ve left myself along the way. This process helps the book root itself more firmly in my mind and makes it easier to find a path forward. I always find that I’ve unknowingly left myself hints and clues about what might happen next.

Because each writer’s process is different, some of these techniques may not work for you. I suggest you think of them as a place to start assembling your own box of tricks to address your own particular challenges. And if you find any good ones that work for you, share them with me. With writing, as with life, I need all the help I can get.

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