It’s always a relief to get to spring. This year, hit the ground running by spending a few minutes each day reinvigorating, re-evaluating, and refreshing your writing space, practice, tech, and even language. Not only will you get a wonderful endorphin boost, but you will have the space and clarity to see your writing through a fresh, energized lens.
Start by picking one of the 5 great ways to spring clean your writing today. Then each day try another, until your writing life is lean, gleams, and inspires you to great things!
In many countries, airing out the home is a daily act. For good reason: opening all the doors and windows even for a few minutes releases chemicals, spores, and odors, reduces carbon dioxide, and prevents moisture build-up. It also feels symbolically cleansing to let the stuffiness of winter out and spring in and is a fantastic way to start your writing for the day.
Tip: Air out when outdoor pollutants are at their lowest point like evening or early morning.
For writers, space care is self-care. When your desk is clear, so is your ability to be your most productive!
Throw out half-broken pencils, pens that don’t make you happy, and old papers.
Gather the scrawled notes, throw on some music, and type the useable bits into a “notes” file so you can toss them and streamline your space. No time? Bundle the snips of paper with a large clip.
Tidy your desk drawer. Writer Marion Ann says, “More than once, I’ve found a tiny piece of inspiration hiding in that drawer.”
“Spring cleaning isn’t just about getting rid of things; it’s about rediscovering what still matters.”
The suggestion that we cull our collections is a touchy subject. When Marie Kondo dared advise us to streamline our libraries down to 30 books some years back, it caused a firestorm of a response from the book-lover community.
Most writers value our books as our “bibliothèque d’intérieur” (internal library) as well as physical trophies or totems that have nurtured, ushered, and informed us throughout our lives.
While this writer in Salon magazine feels throwing books in the trash is perfectly alright, and if the book is in truly rough shape, it could simply be viewed as “paper, ink, and glue” to justify tossing it in the bin, most people would recoil at the thought of books as the mere sum of their physical parts and would not entertain tossing them as an option.
As conversations, life-starters, and life-givers, books are designed to be shared. While they serve as glorious intelligent thoughtful reminders of the life you’ve lived in stacks around your home, piled three-deep on the shelf, and as makeshift end tables holding up your lamps (ok, my lamps), when instead you gift, share, or donate them, you’re ensuring others can enjoy them as you have while also making room for new reading experiences.
The books you have read will be part of you forever, but by getting rid of those you know you won’t read again, you will enjoy knowing you’re sharing ideas and stories with other readers. Plus, making room for new books is exciting. And a leaner library and clearer surfaces will invariably lead to a clearer mind where fresh new ideas have room to unfold.
Pop a few in a little free library
Donate a larger number to your public library
Put a box of them in front of your house or building with a sign that says “FREE IDEAS”
Sell them to a used bookstore
Give them to friends
Like the extra ten pounds of “Winterspeck” (winter bacon) that so easily accumulates during the cold months, it’s also all too easy to let the files on your computer pile up. Too many, and your computer will become sluggish or stop working altogether.
This spring, lighten your load by doing the following:
Backing up your hard drive should be done regularly. Make it a ritual you enjoy: brew coffee, put on some jazz, and set about bringing over all your hard-earned work to an external hard drive unit or into a cloud storage solution.
Tip: Back up your hard drive 1x/month on the first of each month, minimum. Use all the disasters you’ve heard from others (or experienced yourself) as cautionary tales to be your motivating factor to keep this up.
Having 51 open internet tabs is the writer’s normal, but not only is it mentally draining to be continuously confronted by your running to-do list (that somehow never gets to-done), it also uses a ton of processing energy on your computer.
The Chrome extension One Tab will save both your wellness and your computer.
With a single click, this Chrome extension consolidates all your open tabs into a neat list in one tab, freeing up precious mental bandwidth for focused writing and unburdening your computer’s processors. Your tabs are still there and accessible, but now at least they aren’t staring at you while you write.
Do you find yourself buried beneath a mountain of loose papers, scribbled notes, and half-finished manuscripts? (Silly question. You’re a writer; of course you do). You’re in luck that it is remarkably easy to digitize your papers nowadays, so you can store them as files on your computer instead.
For large jobs, invest in a flat-bed scanner or one with a document feeder for larger stacks of letter-sized papers.
For small papers, utilize one of the many excellent (and free) smartphone apps such as Google Drive (simply click the “+”) to easily snap pics and turn them into digital files.
Additionally, for iPhone users, the built-in apps “Preview” and “Notes” also have a scanning feature. Android users can use Adobe Scan or Genius Scan.
Not only does digitizing your papers declutter your physical space, it also ensures your writing is easily accessible and searchable across your devices. Easier and far less clutter for the win.
You have a job, a couple of kids, a spouse, and need to cook, clean, and have a laugh once in a while. Recognizing your limits is important. You have goals, you have dreams, and you want your book to be published before AI does it better. But you cannot do it at the expense of reality (because trying to cheat reality only ends up cheating your mental health).
Establishing a realistic writing practice is freeing. Whether for you it’s about regularly getting into the chair, or using deadlines to pump you up, once you know exactly how much time you can spend in the chair, when, and how, you will find your focus is fiercer and your ability to get down to the actual work more efficient.
No more “squeezing it in.” This spring, know your schedule, and you’ll get much more work done as a result.
Because your writing time is precious, you cannot have anything standing in your way once it’s your time to work.
Living a creative life makes us better people.
Practicing creativity is something that needs to be conscious, and the reward is exponential and spreads across everything you do.
Use Cultivating Creativity, our fun and stimulating 1-month daily creativity course, to rejuvenate a tired mind and spirit or to spark a new creative flow!
We aren’t machines (yet), so, please, go be human. Spring is the best time to:
The more you care for your human self, the better a writer you will be.
This spring, aim to declutter your inner house as well as your outer. Even removing a single word from your sentences leans things out and shows the world you’re an articulate boss.
Here are 4 to start with this spring:
⇒ The shopping bag that I left on the stairs
⇒ The manuscript that I sent to the agent
As a relative pronoun that we use more often than we need, that is not necessary.
2. Just
Just (just) weakens your sentences and your position as a speaker. “I was just wondering whether you’d had a chance to read my submission.” Sounds wishy-washy compared to “I was wondering whether you’d had a chance to read my submission.”
Just is rarely needed. Omit it and see how much more direct (yet still friendly) you sound!
See how often you lean on these (in emails and in your prose), then evaluate: are they absolutely really necessary?
4. Prose “distancers”:
⇒ Feel / Felt / Thought / Think
⇒ Saw / Heard / Noticed / Observed
⇒ Wondered / Realized / Understood
These words often create a distance gap between the reader and the experience being described, making the writing feel like a report rather than an immersion.
Example: “She felt the cold wind” becomes “The cold wind whipped around her.”
Tip: Be on red alert for one grammatical glitch you’re susceptible to and fix it. (Again, write it on a Post-it so you know to look out for it).
Spring is the ideal time to shake out your wintered mental cobwebs and decide how you want to live in the world as a thinker, ideas-generator, and creative engine by reviewing or reviving your goals.
⇒ Reinstate your micro goals and how you will achieve them to reach the larger goal’s target
⇒ Read outside of your project’s genre and see how it fuels you from the side
⇒ Write about your process and practice as if advising your younger self to keep your motivation high.
⇒ This time of year is perfect for starting a new project: the novel, memoir, or business/nonfiction book you’ve wanted to write but haven’t known how or when
(Our 4-month book-writing programs are an ideal way to kick off your writing spring!)
⇒ Dust off an old short story draft or essay to get your name into the publishing mix (and to boost your portfolio)
⇒ Learn how to do something that will benefit your book(s) and platform: alleviate being frustrated and overwhelmed and finally learn what you need to start marketing your work; do some research on speaking engagements in your community; update your website, etc.
Accumulated clutter and a little sluggishness infiltrating our work and lives are simply part of slowing down and curling up in winter. It’s a necessary time of year, and that slowing is often needed.
Yet when spring arrives, it’s a delight to greet it with new energy. These 5 great ways to spring clean your writing unburden and refresh your space, practice, and process for the season ahead. They will make you feel lighter, more focused, and ready to tackle your projects with enthusiasm and purpose, preparing you for some great writing ahead!
Part of spring cleaning for a writer is knowing how to maximize your productivity and fast-track your projects to publication and your writing to new levels. We are here to help you write and write with success.
Reach out for a free consultation any time! We love to talk to writers and to help you however you need.
Or seize upon spring and start your book in one of our highly effective 4-month first-draft book programs:
Our 4-month Mentored Book Programs, Online Courses, & Writing Coaching and Editing Hours. From November 21-27, 2023