Prism Book Tours Spotlight: Wildwood Creek by Lisa Wingate

How do you find the time to write?Honestly, this seems to be more of a challenge now than it was when I started.  That’s counterintuitive, because when I started writing full time, I had small children at home, so I was juggling my writing schedule around diapers, naptimes, and school activities. The reality is, though, that the writing business has grown more complex and time consuming over the years.

Twelve years ago, when my first novel came out, keeping in touch with readers entailed answering daily email or letters, and speaking at banquets or book events from time to time. Now, there’s Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and the list goes on and on. There are writers’ loops to follow, promotional groups to participate in, and a wide, wide world of people to keep in contact with.  It’s easy to spend literally hours tied up with these things and never find writing time. Meeting deadlines is a matter of a scheduling for yourself, either in terms of a daily word count, or in terms of keeping certain writing hours each day. It’s difficult, though, when there’s an actual person on the other end of the cyber communication, awaiting your response. I think these days the struggle most writers face is the challenge of balancing writing time and marketing time.

I think that maintaining sanity and staying focused in a world filled with sound bytes, distractions, and demands is a challenge.  There’s a silent intimation that if we can’t do everything, be everything, and have everything all at once, we’re somehow failing.  For me, the key to not driving myself crazy is in facing the fact that I’m just me.  I’m not Wonder Woman, and that’s okay.  I try to remind myself of the things that really matter and to stay focused on what will be significant in a year, five years, ten years, and so on.  So many of the issues that eat up our time and our writing lives really don’t matter beyond tomorrow, when you get right down to it.

Do you always write at your computer?

For years I did write at a computer, but through a series of happenstances and trial and error, I have discovered the magic of dictation. For the last couple years, I’ve been doing much of my writing via dictation on my iPhone or iPad.  This can look and sound fairly insane, but it has been a wonderful productivity tool for me, and very freeing in the creative sense. There’s an analytical level of thought that goes into typing and that is completely removed when I dictate a story.  Aside from that, dictation via the phone allows me to put on a headset and write literally anywhere.  When I find myself getting stale, I’ll wander to the back pasture for a walk, or spend some time in the exercise room and dictate parts of the story while I’m there.  Sometimes a change of scenery or physical activity is exactly what I need to get the words flowing again.