How Do you Write?

 

 

How do you write your stories, blogs, poems? Are you in your living room or bedroom? Do you have music going or a T.V. in the background?  What do you use to write with? There are a lot of different ways to help a writer write more efficiently and be more productive. Mainly, it’s just a change of your writing environment. 

I used to try and write in the living room with the T.V. on in the back ground. The dogs playing with the cat around me and my wife talking to me about things she reads on Pinterest. There was too much going on for me to fully focus on what I was trying to accomplish. So, I took an old table we had outside and sanded, stained, and sealed it.  I put it in my spare room and created an “Office!”

The picture up top is my Office. It’s a corner in my spare room which also has my weight bench and a spare couch that unfolds to a bed.  It’s not much but it’s MY writing area. I have headphones I put on and listen to http://www.Last.fm, which is like Pandora. I have an instrumental station going so I don’t find myself listening to the words of songs. It helps block out everything else going on in my house.

I use WriteMonkey for short stories and poems. It’s free and has spell checking. You can also have it sound like an old typewriter when you type which I find enjoyable for some reason. For my novels/novellas I’m working on, I use Scrivener which costs $40. It has templates for writers who are working on short stories or novels. It has tabs along the side you can click on to open up research, notes, pictures, ect. There’s a lot you can do with it as far as formatting, “Print a novel using standard manuscript formatting. Export your finished document to a wide variety of file formats, including Microsoft Word, RTF, PDF and HTML—making it easy to share your work with others. Or self-publish by exporting to ePub or Kindle* formats to share your work via iBooks or Amazon, or for reading on any e-reader.”(http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php) 

So, This is my setup and those are my tools. It’s not much right now but it’s more than I had a month ago. Since then, I’ve noticed a how much easier it is for me to concentrate and write. My productivity has increased and my quality is slightly better.  I’ll keep improving my little office space with pictures, painting the wall, getting a better chair, ect, but right now it’s all I really need.

What do you use? Where do you write? Have you changed anything and noticed your writing better or more frequently?