In the name that is all that is ridiculous in the world, I was up until 3am last night writing Jack/Ianto office supplies porn (you can point all the blame for that in amand_r's direction). I only stopped at 3am because it hurt too much to keep my eyes open. In the cold light of day, office supplies porn is still made of awesome, though I've paused to ponder the relative sexiness of a glue stick and just what might do instead.

In other words, I'm at the point of "I'd like to keep writing, but I'm not compelled to write yet, so I'll tweak my conditions until I hit the jackpot comfort zone and can hammer out words like a mofo again."

Other writers, do you do this too? Tweak the conditions until they're conducive to writing? Here are the things that I do:

• Change the place I'm storing the story as I write - between google doc to word doc.


• Change what the writing looks like on the screen. Often if I'm itching to start I'll just being hammering away in the default font and paragraph (Times New Roman in word, Verdana in google docs). However, I inevitably reach a point where the visual is uninspiring, or making me skim through re-reads. In this case I'll often change it to Georgia (10.5pt, 1.5 line spacing), which is my favourite font and paragraph conditions ever. If that's unhelpful, I try changing from serif to sans serif.


• Change the view of the document. Print view to web view, run-on to page separation, margins and width.


• Read it through as it would look when posted. Often I find this helpful for rendering all the formatting alone (markup while reading is a bit of a speed bump). I'll chuck it in a wordpress new post or LJ entry and read through it in preview. This is probably my most helpful tactic, seriously.


• Start building the header for the story. Combined with the point above, this gets me more anticipatory about upcoming posting, urging me on to write more.

...I think ultimately what all of the above does, even if I'm not putting new words on the page in the process, is keeping my attention on the story I'm writing, keeping it in the forefront of my mind. Hopefully keeping things turning over until I'm at the point where I can continue actually writing.

What are your tactics?