Doug talks about finding the time to write and using the time you have to write. Authors need to get the words out, but we don't always follow our own advice.

Transcript:

Stephen 0:47All right, well, welcome back to the podcast, part two with Doug Lawrence. And we're going to talk a little bit about some author writing things. So, Doug, with this book that you wrote, what were some things that you learned, and things that you're going to do different for your second book, you know, the

Doug Lawrence 1:03biggest thing that I've found with writing the first book, the gift of mentoring, and now I'm working on this second one, it's the whole time factor, and it's being disciplined enough to carve out so much time a day to actually sit down and write. Because what I find is that it's very easy. With everything else that's going on, it's very easy to get pulled in different directions. And, and then the end of the day comes in the book is you haven't even cracked, you know, any writing or anything like that. So for me that it's definitely the discipline that's required to make sure that you have time allocated on a daily basis to write the book.

Stephen 1:48And what do you do to make sure you have that time? Do you have any tricks? Or, you know, what are you doing? Or what are your goals? What to you is a good amount of time?

Doug Lawrence 2:01I think, you know, and actually, I had this conversation earlier this morning was one of my close colleagues said to me, so do you have time carved out in your calendar, to do your writing today, and that's the big thing that I need to do is, if it's not in my calendar, then it probably won't happen. And so, you know, carving out, say, even if it's just an hour is just putting an hour in the calendar, you know, to be able to say, okay, from 9am to 10am, I'm going to write, and probably earlier in the day is better, because as the day goes on, you know, your creative juice in the tank kind of diminishes. So it's, it's being able to hear what's the optimum time and then how much of that optimum time Do I need to carve out and make sure that I do that on a regular basis. And I've, I've been negligent in doing that. And all that does is you have people that are, you know, wanting to read the next book, and you just keep pushing the date out, eventually they're gonna lose interest in, you know, following and waiting for this next book.

Stephen 3:10And I do that too. I think a lot of authors do finding that time blocking, put your mind in the right mental state. That Okay, at nine o'clock, I'm going to right so Okay, I'll take care of the dogs get some D and then your brain gets in gear. We were talking a little bit before about like the the flow state. Once you kind of it's Pavlov's dog, you know, you train yourself, okay, I'm ringing the bell time to start thinking about writing. And you start salivating words and you go off. And I know a lot of authors say oh, I struggled to write I struggled to write. And it's like, well, when did you plan to write? Well, I was going to try in the morning or I was going to try after lunch. They don't actually tell themselves I have to do this. And that I think becomes a big problem.

Doug Lawrence 3:57Yeah, most definitely. I was just going to say I envy people that can pack up all this stuff and move away to someplace and spend you know two months writing a book. I actually those are the people I really envy that. Just it's not going to happen that way for me.

Stephen 4:14So do you write at home Do you write Do you have a computer do you write on like a yellow pad you go to a coffee shop what's your what's your way of writing.

Doug Lawrence 4:24Now for me,