What Kind of Writer Are You?

The first step of preparing to undertake a long-term creative exercise, like NaNoWriMo, is to figure out what kind of artist you are.

First things first: What is the best time of day for you to create?
Are you a morning person? When the sun is cresting the horizon, is your coffee already cooling and your fingers are all warmed up? Do you get the best ideas while mulling over lunch in the middle of the day because the sandwich is stacked just right? Or is nighttime the right time to get out the good stuff? Right after you get home? When the world has gone to bed are your creative juices finally waking up?

What are your chosen materials?
Do you write long-hand? Do you type on a laptop, desktop, phone, typewriter? I've been known to use a dictation program for early rough drafts.

What are your methods?
Do you need to eat? Warm tea, ice water, coffee, scotch? Music, cafe sounds, absolute silence? Cigarettes, pipe, blunt, vape? Does a rerun of The Brady Bunch have to be playing in the left-most corner of the room behind you while you chew on celery and hum Bach?

Knowing all of these things, you can start to plan your creating day.

Personally, I am best in the early afternoon on a keyboard in a cafe with a steady supply of coffee. However, I have a day job. So, the plan is to eat lunch at my desk and then take my lunch at my desk, on my laptop, with a full cup of coffee and my earbuds in playing cafe sounds from an app like Noisli.

Jimmy likes to write after the twins are in bed, on his 1957 Royal typewriter while chewing on a pipe stem. The typewriter will wake up the kids, so Jimmy may use his laptop, with a typewriter app installed. It doesn't have the same action, but maybe with a mechanical keyboard he could get closer.

Do you go through bouts of creativity and stretches of time where getting out of bed is a struggle? How you want to work around that is up to you. I just call them mental health days and they don't count on my personal timeline. I got through the day without serious harm and that was hard enough; I will not beat myself up for not being creative on top of everything else I did that day. Even if the sum total of the day was continuing to breathe and making it to the bathroom in time. My deadline is now December 1st, and I'm okay with that.

Think things over. For you, it might make sense to wake up a couple of hours early to knock out a couple of pages. You could ride the train and type or you could dictate while you drive (set it up before you actually start moving!). Get yourself an electric kettle for bottomless tea. Set up a babysitter for quiet afternoons. Figure out how to do you.

The earlier you plan it out, the less time you waste not making art!