early morning writing hack (real) (it's been working for about a month now):
think about the scene you're going to work on that morning not when you sit down to write, but the previous evening. this is daydreaming but with purpose. think about what might happen and how the characters feel about it. get excited. don't write a single word.
go about your evening normally, doing whatever else you do. your subconscious is a slow cooker and while you do other stuff, it's working on your idea for you.
get up early, like an hour before you'd need to start your day if you were cutting it close. everyone else in the world is snoozing their alarm, so no one can bother you rn. you're free! no one can judge your writing, not even you!
(optional i guess but it really helps me) unless the first few words of your scene are already clear in your mind, warm up. I've abandoned the idea of warm-up drabbles or whatever the hell people recommend. instead, I pull up a story by someone whose writing I love, and I type out a fragment of it in a blank doc, reading the words out loud as I go. this wakes up my writing brain as I become aware of how their prose and dialogue work their magic, when and where they reveal new information, how each detail leads to the next. I'd advise doing this with work that is of high quality and purposeful, so you can learn their tricks, but I'm not the boss of you.
write!!!!!!!
don't stop to judge if it's good or not!! it's too early for that shit!! if the draft sucks you can fix it later but you need the draft done first!!
do stop once yesterday evening's daydreaming prep has run out and you're out of steam. (sometimes the momentum can reveal the next part of the story you hadn't actively considered yet, but don't depend on it.) if you hit a wall where you have no idea how to continue, or it's still too vague to put words down, trying to push through will only bring frustration. and even if you do manage to write a bit more, the chances you'll end up scrapping it later because it doesn't fit are significant. just call it there, you're done.
take a minute to appreciate what you accomplished. you now have words you didn't have yesterday. you won the day, and meanwhile everyone else is still asleep, the absolute losers
if you use a word tracker, go ahead and input your word count for the day. maybe you got a lot done, or maybe you didn't; it's a victory either way. on mornings when I've been struggling, writing and then erasing and writing again, if I'm too pissed off to check the word count I just put down a symbolic number, like 50 words. it may not look like much, but when I look at the month's stats it feels good to have proof that I showed up and did the thing even when it was hard.
now you can start your day. and frankly at this point I don't give a shit how annoying my day is, because I already did the thing I care about getting done, so I'm not going through work resenting every task for stealing brain juice I could've used for writing in the evening. "I'll write when I'm done with work" is the ADHD hubris devil speaking.
and now it's the evening and you're free to daydream again!! and use absolutely zero brain power!! wheee!!

















