Tuesday, January 24, 2012

5 Tricks to a Revising Mood

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If you are like me, then you have to be in a "certain" mood to revise. At least revise well. This magical mood makes everything flow better. It not only sparks ideas of paragraphs to move around, but the right words also start coming to you quicker than a Real Housewife can cause drama.

But knowing how to get in that magical mood can be a bit more challenging. Here are my Five Tricks to try when wanting to get in the revising mood.

1.) Get active: a good workout of the whole body definitely encourages the brain to get active as well.

2.) Get calm: my personal choice I mentioned last week: a nice long bath. It not only helps me think, but it calms my mind which makes my revising more productive.

3.) Get sweets. Enough said!

4.) Get focused: one of the best ways I've found to get in a revising mood is to not finish everything in the last revision session. That may seem counter productive, and unfortunately sometimes it is. But usually if I have an idea of what I'm working on when I sit down and have a game plan of how to attack it, things will go much easier. The harder part is knowing just how little you can leave undone that will motivate you to get back to your project later. For me, that's usually only one or two paragraphs of text that needs revised. Once I start that the next time around, I'm in the mood already and its easier to tackle the next forty pages of revisions.

5.) Get your booty in the chair. That's really all you need. Once you've done all the others the last trick is that you have to make time for revising. This is sometimes very hard. Especially when a marathon of the Real Housewives of Orange County is on. But resisting the urge and getting your butt in the chair is half the battle.

(Now if only I could find a booty chair like these, I'm sure I'd be in a revising mood all the time. Because who wouldn't be motivated to sit in one of these all the time? :) )

--Emily, Miss Querylicious

3 comments:

Kate Fall said...

Emily, I also use the "leave one paragraph undone so you can start easy next time" trick. However, I know I'm neglecting keeping active. Times like this I wish I lived down South where it's warm!

Emily Marshall said...

Yes warm weather would be awesome!

DeenaML said...

I'm with you on all but the bath. Too relaxed = sleeeepy. :)