Use Structure to Support Your Creativity
Six general principles of productivity for writers
Happy 2025, everyone! I’m gearing up for an exciting writing year ahead, which means it’s organization time.
There was a time in my writing life when I avoided productivity and eschewed systems. Any time spent organizing wasn’t creative, so I considered it wasted time. When justifying my lack of organization, I’d reference the character Rimmer (from my husband’s favorite Brit Com, Red Dwarf). Rimmer spent so many months color coding his study organization system, he never got around to studying. He failed his exam and enjoyed a comically spectacular nervous breakdown. I feared meeting a similar fate.
During my anti-organization years, I worked super hard and achieved very little. Thrilling projects raced out of the starting gate, then floundered. Planting my butt in my writing chair on a daily basis wasn’t the plan for success I’d hoped.
Motherhood changed my perspective. Suddenly my butt was very busy doing mom things and writing time grew so limited. I despaired. What could I hope to accomplish in so little time? Too stubborn to give up my writing, I studied a little productivity. I’m so glad I did.
Six productivity principles hold my writing life together. Below are the pillars that provide the minimal support my creative life needs to flourish—plus a few mentionss of my go-to tools and systems.
Pillar One: Connect clear intentions to concrete action by combining long-term and short-term planning
Here’s the universal principle of writing productivity: connect clear intentions to concrete action.
How?
First, schedule occasional, big-picture planning sessions to review and reflect on your creative journey. Mine are quarterly. During these sessions ask yourself not just what you want to accomplish, but why. You might journal or envision your creative life five or ten years in the future.
Next, it’s critical to break down lofty goals into achievable steps. My productivity mentor text, The 12-Week Year for Writers by Trevor Thrall, taught me to schedule weekly mini-planning sessions to connect my big-picture vision to daily work.
Pillar Two: Wrangle time: scheduling, habits, and sessions vs. deadlines
I’m a habit junkie. Maybe you’re a scheduler.
Wrangle time by habit
Use a daily trigger to prompt your writing session(s). When my kiddos are at school, I write after my morning workout. On weekends and holidays I write after lunch. Every single day. It’s that simple.
Wrangle time by schedule
Chances are your daily routines are more complex than mine. If so, you might schedule your writing time by blocking it on your calendar like an appointment.
Have a plan and check it
When you and your butt arrive in your writing chair, know what you plan to accomplish. This is what I’m doing Monday mornings: checking my plan for the week, then jotting todos for my daily writing sessions.
Balance deadlines and sessions
Before having kids, all my writing time was session based. I’d pick a project and peck away with no particular goal. Later, while learning to organize, I imposed tight deadlines on myself every single day.
For me, working exclusively with daily deadlines was a recipe for constant stress and a doom-like sense of failure. Then, I hit on a solution: divide my writing week into sessions and deadlines.
Choosing 2-3 milestone targets each week and scheduling a few relaxed sessions to sit and explore a project keeps me moving, but allows periods of creative free time that are both enjoyable and necessary to my creative process.
Pillar Three: Provide flexible structure for your writing process
When staring down the blank page, it’s helpful to have a reliable approach to your project. My process evolves with time and varies for different types of prose.
Do you follow an established process? Have you made a Frankenstein’s monster of several approaches? Invented your own?
Story Genius by Lisa Cron inspired my current process. When I’m creatively stuck, a brief review of the system often indicates potential solutions.
Scrivener is my current drafting app of choice.
Pillar Four: Reuse your work (templates, templates, templates)
Templates are my friends. I hate doing the same work twice.
A Story Genius Scrivener template jumpstarts my short story and novella projects. Obsidian templates facilitate both my quarterly and weekly writing organization. I streamline submissions by keeping an updated bio and cover letter handy. Templates help capture world building and character notes for my fantasy series. I lean on templates to record publishing and marketing data for my indie publishing projects.
Templates rescue me from Rimmer’s fate of puttering away my writing time and creative energy.
Pillar Five: Establish receptacles for important stuff
It’s so frustrating being unable to find my important writing stuff. Seriously. I know, because I’ve lost stuff so many times.
You’re a writer. You have rough drafts and edited drafts and final drafts and revised drafts and manuscripts formatted for that market with wacky submission requirements.
You have story ideas. Dreams. Inspirations.
You have loads of projects. Tons of submissions.
You’ll need to know where to store these things so you can find them.
For me, Scrivener does a great job collecting ideas and bundling drafts into manageable projects. I organize formatted manuscripts in Dropbox. My submission tracker is on Airtable. A Kanban project tracker just revolutionized my writing life by helping me visualize projects and their status. No more lost or unidentifiable stories.
Pillar Six: Analyze your progress: count, connect, be flexible
The sixth support of my writing process would be so easy to skip--especially when I’d rather get writing. In The 12-Week Year for Writers, Trevor Thrall digs deep into the reasons and methods for this critical final step of writing productivity. For this post, I’m going to keep it simple:
Count
Count something. Words drafted, hours spent, weekly goals achieved. Don’t drive yourself nuts. Counting (for me) can be an opportunity for self-flagellation. Instead, approach it by analyzing relative numbers as indicators you’re moving toward those big dreams you identified when setting intentions.
Connect
Talk to other writers about how your week went. Failing that, talk to your cat or your neighbor. Getting out of your own head helps prevent getting lost in the weeds.
Be flexible
When your plan inevitably veers off track, keep calm--says someone who’s never managed this, ever--but you will. Retool your expectations or schedule more writing sessions. Meandering a little off your charted route may bring unexpected inspiration. Just remember you chose that route for a reason. If that reason still speaks to you, you’ll find your way back.
Productivity supports creativity
Thanks to feeling like I had no time, I learned that a little organization can go a very long way. Now, I include weekly and quarterly organization as part of my official “writing time.” The inclusion is a signal of acceptance and respect for the necessary productivity work that supports my creative life.
This was super helpful Heather!