6

Schedules and Sneaking Around

Finding the Time to Write

“The greatest thief this world ever produced is procrastination, and he is still at large.”

~ Henry Wheeler Shaw

What if you’re too busy to write? Or your focus looks like trying to meditate while snowboarding? You wake up before the sun, filled with grand intentions. But by 6:00 PM you’re shaking your head. Not again. The day flew by with a thousand distractions and nothing to show for it! Will I ever break this cycle? Will my book ever get the attention it deserves?

Time’s a bitch. None of us comes out alive. Every writer I know and that you’re about to hear from is in a daily battle to wrangle this sucker—their schedule—to get to the Promised Land, affixing “The End” to their tale, preferably without blowing up their life. Some writers are better at it than others. While the healthiest authors I know can rally 24/7 when nearing a deadline, they mostly choose not to. They’ve learned to write fast in any location or situation and miss few dinners with the fam. They’ve achieved a measure of “life balance” without sacrificing health or happiness, at least not for long. (Their kids, incidentally, are less likely to grow up and pen a tell-all.) And, then there are the Time Debtors—those teeth-grinding, hair-thinning, eyes-burning-as-if-in-asandstorm writers who forever push the limits of their schedule, energy, and relationships.

Some, like me, fall somewhere in the middle of these two camps.

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It must’ve been our kid’s nose, an inch from mine, that woke me up.

“Morning, little buddy,” I whispered, praying that if I didn’t make any sudden movements, our towheaded two-year-old would fall back to sleep. No such luck. Seemed like I’d just gone to bed, having closed my laptop at the first streaks of daylight. Through slits, I found Tosh already dressed—proudly filling out his new Baby Gap sweatshirt and stone-washed jeans. They’d just arrived in a big FedEx box, a gift from one of Carol’s sorority sisters whose corporate gig at the Gap in San Francisco meant she could help the financially and fashionably challenged for pennies on the dollar.

God, he looks cute, I thought, running my fingers through his baby-fine curls.

“Hurry, Mama! Park!” T commanded, jumping off the bed. “You, me, and Daddy!” Just then, Jesse appeared, carrying a mini hot pink baseball bat my folks had given us. Our son was quite the attraction, swinging for the fences and often clearing them. Neighbors called him “Bamm-Bamm.”

I tackled Tosh back into our pillows. “You two sluggers go and have fun and come back and tell me all about it. Mama’s gonna study.” I kissed them goodbye in a group hug and tried not to shut the door behind them with too much enthusiasm. Once out of sight, I beelined to my computer. Are you kidding me? Ninety whole minutes of quiet, all mine!

“Come to the gym with us!” said Jesse the next morning, picking up his Adidas bag and leaning over to lace up his high-tops. Tosh climbed onto Daddy’s back and up onto his shoulders.

“Thanks, you two Muscle Men,” I said, “but Mama needs to stay here and wrestle chapter three.” Jesse scrunched up his face. “It’s all good!” I sang. “We’ll do popcorn and Mary Poppins tonight!”

Later, my friend Kelly called, wanting to meet for lunch at a spot she knew I loved on Ventura Boulevard. “What’s it called? I feel like I haven’t seen you in a thousand years!” she whined.

“I know! Marmalades. I miss you too! But next time.”

And on it went. I refused to shirk my duties as Domestic Goddess and cooked every breakfast, lunch, and dinner; walked our dogs each morning and evening; vacuumed daily and ditto on the laundry; grew organic squash and basil; blended my own pesto and breastfed my kid until he was old enough to drive. (Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration.) Something had to give—somethings. I missed countless requests: Birthday celebrations. Dinner parties. Double dates. Even a family reunion. But Lives Charmed was barely readable, and if I ever hoped to finish it (and make up for the income I’d lost by no longer working while I wrote it), I had rules of punctuation to master. Story arcs to figure out. Interviews to secure. Tapes to transcribe. Have I made it clear we couldn’t bank indefinitely on my husband’s acting income?

And can we talk about typing for a sec? Despite taking it in high school, I was an absolute slowpoke. A two-hour interview took weeks to transcribe. My paranoia didn’t help any. I was tortured by thoughts that someone would steal my ideas and get to market first. Visions of word robbers climbing through our windows to run off with my computer haunted me. So obsessed was I about loss from fire, theft, or asteroid that I snail-mailed myself self-addressed envelopes containing titles and chapter ideas just in case I ever had to prove ownership through a stamped date on a postmark. When a computer crash wiped out twenty especially hard-earned pages (this was before I’d mastered floppy disks—kids, look it up!—or there was such a thing called cloud storage), I wept like I’d run over our Border collies. Every afternoon my HP printer churned out recycled laser copies of whatever chapter I was on to stash for safekeeping under the couch, behind the stereo, and in the trunk of my car. Obsess much?

The way I saw it, stealing time for my art before some lucky bastard stole my thunder was paramount. Stealing. That’s what it felt like: ripping hours off from people, hobbies, and pastimes I treasured but could no longer make room for because I was driven. Pangs of guilt would hit when saying no so often, but my book beckoned like a sexy suitor in a clandestine affair. It didn’t seem to matter that I was writing in the middle of the night until my family got up for the day; as long as I had guaranteed hours to myself followed by quality time with them, my goofy smile was visible morning ’til night. But I would have to safeguard my sanity from those who judged me for all the time my writing was taking.

“Writers are selfish,” a friend’s husband remarked at one of the few barbecues I’d attended that summer. “The very act turns people into assholes.”

I wasn’t an asshole for all the hours I spent writing, was I? I didn’t feel like it, but I was highly attuned to how fast time was moving in my quest for blocks to concentrate, and I worried about being seen as inconsiderate or self-involved. People, like the muse, are noisy, not to mention needy, and more often than not, adorable. I adored my people, but was it selfish to always want to get back to the page? Was it wrong to eye the door, plotting my next disappearing act, which, come to think of it, rarely fooled anybody? Anyone with eyes at Tosh’s eventual Little League practices could see me in the stands glancing down at the pile of papers and red pen in my lap.

It seemed to me that the sooner I made peace with how often I’d rather be writing than doing most anything else—even being with those I cherished—and get some structure around the insanity of it, the more present I could be with loved ones when I wasn’t writing.

One afternoon Tosh and I walked into Barnes & Noble, and there it was: the relationship book I’d seen in my original book dream, with the same title and everything! It was pimped out on the front table with surrounding red construction-paper hearts for Valentine’s Day. Of course, I understood I lacked the credentials to dispense relationship advice. But still. What the actual what? I’m not even done with book one! What does this mean for Lives Charmed? Is someone about to publish her next?

Some days found me panicked—stalking and stealing time like an addict pursuing her next fix. On others, though, I moved through my days as if I had all the time in the world, knowing God had the situation under control and that things would get even easier once our kid was grown. (Wink.)

I also experienced the opposite problem: difficulty setting myself up to write. Anne Lamott calls this “aerobic mole checking”—where we jump in and out of our chair to attend to something, anything, rather than write. This happens to me around national elections, where I’m far more likely to watch the news and prepare comfort food and feel guilty because I’m not writing than feel guilty because I’d rather be writing.

Point being, time has been around a reeeeeallly long time—almost forever—and yet despite sundials, DayRunners, and iCalendars, most of us still wrestle with how to spend it. I even gave a TEDWomen talk about “Time Debt”—how we often mismanage time, overspending it attending to others while underspending it on our own goals and dreams—and still struggle to manage it!

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There’s never a good time to get married, have a baby, or get a puppy. But you do those things, and your life expands. Same with writing a book. The underlying takeaway here, as I see it, is about focus. It’s clear, there’s no “right” way to schedule your writing—first thing in the morning, late at night, all day long.

Not all inner clocks tick alike. Every writer has to find their rhythm. Ray Bradbury said, “Anyone who wants to be a writer should write at least one thousand words a day. Every day.” On the contrary, ask Alice Waters if she writes daily and she’ll likely say, “Oh, God, no,” as if that’s the most horrific idea she’s ever heard. It’s a brain thing and a personality thing and a time-of-life-thing and a what-else-is-going-on-in-the-world thing.* (In Alice’s case, it’s also a food thing. As founder of one of the world’s best restaurants, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, California, and the Edible Schoolyard movement, she’s known to rarely sit down, unless it’s to eat.)

I have author friends who shut everything down while on deadline, sequestering themselves in a hermetic bubble. Whereas I’ve written 100 percent–focused in my best friend’s noisy kitchen, her kids and dogs running around the table, her hunky husband serving me soup, as Coldplay blared through my headphones. Hyper-focus is easy for me. Although, when reliving painful memories for my divorce memoir in process (material that requires me to, as my sister puts it, “pull my spleen out through my nose”), there’s no music or merriment happening. For those bits, I prefer the dark stillness of pre-dawn, cozily mummified in the blankets of my bed-office. It’s cheaper than therapy and feels just about as healing.

Figure out how, when, and where you’re in peak flow. Then ask: “How can I best protect this sacred space?” Obviously, turn off your phone and alerts and consider using a timer. And never underestimate the power of headphones and/ or a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door. But your options are many: Should you put a ritual around your focused writing time? Will lighting incense help you stay on track? How about putting your writing sessions in black ink on your calendar? Do you need to hire help or trade kid duty with a neighbor? Would getting up an hour earlier or staying up later do the trick? If partnered, have you tried asking them to feed the dogs and little ones more often?

A client of mine was surprised how easy it was to slip out for half days on Saturdays to the library while her husband watched their two babes. “I get more done on my book on those weekends than I have in years,” she said. (And bonus: Her kids became college football experts!) That’s not to say her house didn’t look like a laundry/breakfast bomb had hit in her absence. “There were socks on the toaster and crumbs in their shoes! How does that happen?” she cried-laughed to me. But once she stopped expecting her man to parent as she does (or practically any other responsible adult), her word count and happiness soared.

Reminder: You’re not selfish! You’ve got skills! Stories to tell! A POV that heals! Your voice is unique only to you and your God/Muse and has put you in situations you’ve triumphed over and given you a dream to help others triumph too.

Your job is to figure out your best working style. Then set your life up accordingly. And be flexible. One schedule might work well for two months or even two years, and then it might not work at all. If you’d like step-by-step instructions for creating your own half day, weekend, or month-long writing getaways, please check out my “Going Dark to Write” blog post on BookMama.com/BWBookLinks.

Okay! You’re doing this! You’ve given yourself permission; silenced the meanies; located and loved on your why. You’re committed to studying and practicing your craft, all supported by your book-tactic schedule. Your focus is for real. This is where things start to get really fun.

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*Fun fact: Beethoven wrote for only four hours a day! In fact, lots of composers and writers had super sane schedules. They’d sit a spell at their desk and then break for lunch, followed by a walk and game-playing in the parlor. Maybe they’d write for another hour or two. Their days seemed quite lovely and mostly drama-free.

And then there was Mozart. Oh, beloved Amadeus. You could say he was one of the lucky ones, attaining rock-star popularity during his lifetime. But Mozart also spent money like a rock star and soon found himself up early tutoring students, only to have to race off to perform for the king and kiss his ring, and then dash back to create a concerto for some rich patron before he could steal time for his own art.