The hardest part of writing is starting. My whole being yells things at me:

• “There’s too much here to get my head around.”
• “You’d do a much better job if you took a walk first, or a nap, or ate chocolate, or had another cup of coffee.”
•  “You don’t have enough time to finish this anyway.”
• “When’s the last time you called your mother?”
• “Why do you think you like writing? It’s way too hard.”

But I do like writing, just not starting to write. I like exercise to, but need some incentive to get out of the house. So, as an incentive for writing, I depend on deadlines. Easier to do when writing is your job, and you go to your office, and your clients, boss, and paychecks depend on you matching their need with your work on time.

Now that I’m freelancing, I’ve had to come up with my own deadlines—and pretend that they are real. That works really well for short pieces. Writing something longer, like a novel, takes a myriad of deadlines. And you have to start, and start, and start, and start.

So here’s my current working plan.

• Work on the novel in a quiet, secluded place for three days in a row. Do not schedule anything on those days until after 3:30, when you are pretty well brain-dead anyway. Take a break between chapters, but nothing too interesting or too long.
• Day 4, work in the coffee shop. By then I need the sound, sight, smell, and vocalization of people all around me. Write blogs, magazine articles, client work, answer emails as they come in, check out Facebook every half hour or so, play Words with Friends and Spider Solitaire, and invite someone to join you for lunch.
• Day 5, wing it with any and all of the above.

Working on the same thing three days in a row makes starting so much easier. As I finish a chapter, I make notes to start here, include this, don’t forget to mention … After my short, boring, and refreshing breaks, starting feels more like continuing—which is really so much easier.

And my reward is people—yes, you guessed it, I’m an extrovert—and activity. And the startings of shorter pieces seem easy in comparison to the details, overview, research, and meticulous writing of the novel.

Works for me.