Five Creative Moods

Even if you don’t have a day job, a family, a social life, or other hobbies, there’s only so much time in the day for writing. If you want to finish your book, you must maximize that time. For me, the act of wringing maximum productivity out of myself is to gauge my mindset and do the thing most conducive to that mood. This isn’t to champion the idea of avoiding discipline – sometimes you must simply make yourself stick to priorities even if you don’t want to – but when I work intuitively like this, I usually feel like no matter what, I’m drawing nearer to my goal. It’s a way of continually “working” even when I’m too tired or distracted to do any “real” writing.

I have five creative moods:

• Mood 1: I have Access, Excel, Visio, Aeon Timeline, and Word tiled across two monitors. My walls are covered in bulletin boards. I have a fresh package of Post-Its, a box of thumbtacks, and a new roll of string. I have fourteen Word documents filled with ideas, and they’re ALL going in the book. WE OUTLINE.
• Mood 2: Open Wikipedia. Reaffirm that there are at most six degrees of separation between Ancient Rome and literally any other topic. [time passes] Why am I so hungry? Oh, because it’s midnight. Soon, Chrome will collapse under the weight of its own tabs, just as the Western Roman Empire collapsed under pressure from the migration of the Goths. WE RESEARCH.
• Mood 3: My soul is a crucible filled with lava. My brain is an infinite crystalline matrix juddering with lightning. I have ingested enough caffeine to kill me, yet I live. WE WRITE.
• Mood 4: I have a dictionary, a rhyming dictionary, a Latin dictionary, and a thesaurus in neat rows on my desk. I do not need these things because I also have an internet connection. The letters ‘x’ and ‘v’ on my keyboard are illegible from excessive cut-and-paste operations. My capacity for tedium is infinite. WE EDIT.
• Mood 5: This book/movie looks inspirational. If I read/watch, it might shake some new ideas loose. Then I will also get to enjoy spending hours after I read/watch wondering how I’ll ever succeed when every good idea is already taken and/or wondering how I could possibly fail given the absolute dreck that publishers/studios will throw money at. WE CONSUME.