Listing our lives

The to-do list is one of the most enduring constants of business life.  For decades we've been exhorted to get our working lives in order using a to-do list.

To-do lists can help us organise our writing lives too.  And top of the list has to be a commitment to a certain amount of writing every day.  Some people like to commit to a number of words written each day.  I aim for 1,000 when I'm writing something new, and if I don't make them I feel like I've short-changed myself.  This is the power of lists.  Writing things down makes the commitment concrete.

Lists can help us deal with rejection too.  When we've suffered a major rejection we often want to curl up in a ball and never come out.  But if we put on our to-do list for today printing out another copy of our first three chapters to send to the next agent on our list, we have a structure to our day that helps us keep moving.

You might want your characters to use to-do lists as well.  These could range from the bizarre, as in the serial killer making him or herself a list of places where they want to kill people, to the tiny victories of a character with agoraphobia, making a to-do list of the number of steps she's going to take outside each day.  Or the abused wife making herself a mental to-do list of the steps she needs to take to leave the relationship.

To-do lists can help our creativity as writers, but they can also help our characters to deal with the ups  and downs of their lives too.