Lessons Learned as an Author Continued Again

Another lesson I’ve learned as an author is that there are many different ways to write. When I started writing at the age of 56, I came across a book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It’s an excellent book on creativity. Julia has a technique called Morning Pages which is to write three hand written pages first thing in the morning. These pages can be anything: your journal, a shopping list or whatever and are a way to get the creative juices flowing for the day. I modified her concept and would review where I left off in my current manuscript and write three handwritten pages of the story first thing in the morning. When I came home from my day job, I’d put those three pages into the computer, editing along the way. This produced two typed pages a day. If you do the arithmetic, in 150 days I’d have a rough draft for a 300-page novel. In fact, this is the way I wrote my first four published novels. Then when I retired in 2007, I modified my approach and wrote each morning directly into the computer. I wrote every morning except if I was doing an event or had a family activity. Doing this until we moved back to Southern California in 2015, I completed a number of manuscripts, some of which have been published. Since then, I have been primarily in editing mode and now have twenty-two published books with more to come.