5CC Success!

I was house sitting this weekend - the past two weekends actually - and so I took my writing projects with me. I took the story I'm currently working on, a manuscript I'm reading for a friend, a book on self-editing, and, naturally, one of the novels I'm reading right now.

Last weekend wasn't that great. I got work done, but not a lot. I was in a spot where I felt stuck and it was a little like getting out of quicksand or tar. I knew where I wanted to go; I just wasn't getting from point A to point B.

Then I remembered a technique an author (I'm pretty sure it was Kathi Appelt) shared at a writing conference I attended last year. I can't remember what she called it, but the idea was that you time yourself for five minutes and you have to keep writing - no matter what. She even gave us permission to write nonsense. The only rule was that we had to keep writing something.

Well, at the conference all I did write was nonsense during this exercise. I went back to my hotel and threw my scribblings away.

But this past weekend I figured it couldn't hurt to try again. After all, I was stuck anyways, right? So I did it, rather we did it - my fellow writer and I. I introduced the idea to her as a 5-minute constant click (5CC) because we were both typing. We had to hear the click of our keyboards for the entire 5 minutes. And we used the technique more than once. We did it a couple of times when we felt that we were slowing down. And, after many "la la la la la's" and a little bit of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” it really worked. It worked so well, in fact, that I was able to complete five chapters on my manuscript this weekend.

I was so excited. I guess the moral of this story is never to underestimate the technique someone hands you just because it didn't work the first time. Thanks, Kathi Appelt!