“The time you spend on art is the time it spends with you; there are no shortcuts, no crash courses, no fast tracks. Only the experience.”
—JEANETTE WINTERSON, FROM THE ESSAY “THE SECRET LIFE OF US”
You know what they say about time: There’s never enough of it. It’s not on your side. It’s elusive and wily and always seems just out of reach, especially if you live in the modern world with its copious responsibilities. Writers are always trying to find it, net it, and pin it down like a precious butterfly from a rare Amazon jungle.
I feel your pain, so I’ll get the hard truth out of the way first: Time is nonnegotiable in a writing practice. You need it; your writing practice needs it. Without time, you have neither writing nor practice. As much as I like to believe that time is “just a concept,” if you choose to ignore it, deadlines won’t get met and stories won’t get written.
Here’s the good news: You have more time than you think. But first you need to get some things out of the way.
I love what Julia Cameron says about distractions: “It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually filling the well.” It often seems like doing “more” will lead to greater productivity. But this is not the case. I’ll never forget the relief I felt when I read the National Public Radio (NPR) story that disproved multitasking as an effective means for getting multiple things done at once. “People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” said neuroscientist Earl Miller. “The brain is very good at deluding itself.”
What brains can do, he said, is shift focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed, which makes you think you’re actually getting multiple things done at once—but you’re not. Instead you’re using what thought leader Linda Stone coined as “continuous partial attention.” This means that you appear to be working on multiple things at once: reading an article and sending e-mail (or, more likely in this day and age, checking Facebook and texting someone), but you aren’t doing any of those things with full attention. You’re left with just as many tasks at the end of each day, only half-completed.
Many creative people attempt multitasking and plate piling. I used to be a master of taking on so many projects that I ran on adrenaline-fueled stress, and eventually I became addicted to stress endorphins. I couldn’t get motivated until a tight deadline (or several) was upon me.
The things that distract you from your writing often give you a form of pleasure or a rush of endorphins. But these distractions also fritter away both time and mental energy for the writing you hope to do.
Most writers need focused quiet time to work (and if not quiet, definitely focused). I didn’t realize how much I needed, as the old adage goes, until it vanished for nearly five years following the birth of my son. But even for those without children, time is so much easier to fill now—there are more methods than ever for distraction, a fact which only increases the amount of downtime you end up needing. You can enter a state beyond empty that I call “creative malnourishment,” and it’s dangerous to productivity.
Step one to creating more time to write is to carve away your distractions. Not all of them, and not all the time, but to start taking a look at where you spend “partial attention” on less important activities that could be reserved for “full attention” on your writing. These can include time spent on social media, a sudden desire to clean your house during writing time, taking phone calls, watching television, putting others’ needs before your own, fixing your car, running errands, volunteering for events that will steal from writing time, and many more—all of which I’ll discuss in chapter six, “Build Boundaries.” We’ll also talk about how to negotiate your commitments to your family, friends, and career in that chapter.
I’m going to wager that you fall into one of two main categories of organizational style: (1) You thrive on a kind of controlled chaos—your desk is a mess of papers and flotsam whose order only you understand—or (2) you need your work space to be neat and orderly so that your brain can follow suit. If you’re interested in categorizing yourself further, these two organizational styles are often referred to as “right-brained” or “left-brained.” There’s a lot of information out there about what it means to be one or the other, but I find that taking quizzes to determine which type you are can become just another distraction.
It’s important to know your style of organization, because you don’t want to waste that precious writing time trying to force yourself into a method that doesn’t work for you. I’ve spent countless hours implementing systems that seem to revolutionize the lives of other people, trying to organize, file, and label the constellation of papers that usually obscure the surface of my desk. And guess what? None of those systems ever lasts for me, because the only one that works is to stack the papers of the relevant projects on top of my desk where I can see them and find them at a moment’s notice. For those of us from the “controlled chaos” school, organizing can become another distraction from actually getting down to the writing.
On the other hand, if you are a person who needs the kind of order that allows for a clean desk, you know it. You knew it when you read the above paragraph and shook your head in horror at the thought of a desk run rampant with papers, books, and various writing utensils. Your task, then, is to separate your organization time from your writing time so that you can, in fact, let yourself write when the urge is upon you rather than file folders or vacuum your office.
No matter which way your brain swings, consider the conditions under which you best write successfully.
The sum of these answers is, of course, your ideal conditions for writing. You won’t always get your ideal conditions, but you will be aware of them, and that is a big step toward carving out the time you need to get the writing done.
Now ask yourself: “How much writing do I need to do to feel accomplished?”
The “pat yourself on the back for hard work” phase comes at different stages for every writer. Before I had a child, I was a “rise at 5:30 A.M. and write for two hours every morning” type of writer, in which I could pump out about 5,000 words in a sitting. Anything less than that and I didn’t feel I’d done enough. Since my son’s birth in 2008, I give myself great accolades if I just make any time to write in a day, and sometimes I have to bring that standard down to “in the week.”
It’s important to have a baseline. A great baseline is “some” writing every day. If you can set up your writing practice to allow for a lot of writing, good for you, but every bit of time you make for writing counts and makes a dent.
One way to keep track of your baseline goals is to create a simple table in Excel or Word and print it out. Let’s say your baseline is to write 2,000 words every day. You can create a simple table that you check off for each day you write. You can even reward yourself for hitting or exceeding your baseline goal: Maybe you wrote 2,000 words every day for a week, which earns you a date night with your spouse.
| BASELINE GOAL | COMPLETED? | TOTAL DAILY WORD COUNT |
|---|---|---|
| Monday: 2,000 words | ✓ | 2,000 |
| Tuesday: 2,000 words | ✓ | 4,500 |
| Wednesday: 2,000 words | ✓ | 2,000 |
| Thursday: 2,000 words | ✓ | 5,000 |
| Friday: 2,000 words | ✓ | 2,400 |
| Saturday: 2,000 words | ||
| TOTAL WORD COUNT | ||
| GOAL REACHED? REWARD: | ||
I’ll be addressing the subject of mental blocks from various angles throughout the book, but I want to make a note in this chapter that it’s okay if you experience a block for taming time. Even if your burning desire is to write every day, and, more specifically, to seek publication, when it comes to really doing what this chapter asks—carving out distractions and determining the right conditions for your successful writing practice—you may find yourself resisting. Resistance is a form of fear. Your fears may run the gamut, but there’s no doubt that making time equals taking your writing practice seriously, and with seriousness comes commitment and responsibility. Or as Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, puts it, “The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”
It’s okay to be a little afraid and do it anyway. Sometimes fear is just a sign that you are embarking on an important path.
Don’t worry; I’m not here to shame you about any efforts at putting off your writing. We all do it—procrastination is as natural to any kind of work as is the need for reward. I believe that most of you procrastinate not so much because you’re afraid or that you require pressure to get working but because of Newton’s law: “An object at rest stays at rest.”
If you don’t put the writing first, you inevitably put your energies elsewhere, and the ball starts rolling down one of a variety of slopes having nothing to do with your writing. You can use therapy or church to help you figure out why, but for our purposes the reason is not so important. When you put your writing first—whether that means rising before work or before your children wake up, or before you check e-mail or pay bills—you are statistically more likely to write and keep writing. At the end of this chapter, I’ve included a list of great apps designed to help keep you focused on your writing.
If you’re an evening writer, obviously you won’t be up and writing at the start of the day, but you still want to approach whatever writing time you designate as a kind of sacred space (more on that in chapter six, “Build Boundaries”) and not place another distraction or task ahead of it.
Procrastination is also often a sign that you are resisting something in particular because of feelings it elicits. Humans are odd animals; we sometimes resist the very things we love or desire out of a fear of failure or a fear of commitment. Authors David Bayles and Ted Orland, in their wonderful book Art & Fear, describe this conundrum as “a species of fear—that fear that your fate is in your own hands, but that your hands are weak.”
Make this your mantra: I put my writing first.
We can’t talk about time without talking about waiting; if you put your work out in the world seeking publication or feedback, rarely does anyone answer immediately, even with the digital speed of life.
Nearly nothing is as pleasurable in a writer’s life as the moment of fulfillment, that warm buoyancy of completion, validation, or approval. As a writer, these moments are unpredictable, on a time line all their own. Maybe you’ve experienced the fulfillment of having finished a draft or met a deadline. At its apex is the fulfillment of validation: Someone loves or wants to publish what you’ve written. In that moment, all you know is that at the top of the steep climb of your hard work, fulfillment is the mother of all endorphin rushes—it’s like a runner’s high meeting unconditional love and manifesting in the biggest pat on the back you’ve ever received.
Waiting for feedback, on the other hand, can often feel buzzy and uncomfortable. It’s an anxious tilting toward the future that promises to bring … well, that’s just the question, isn’t it? When you wait, you enter the shroud of the unknown. Inside waiting, it’s things-go-bump-in-the-night dark. You might even lean toward despair before you know the outcome. You wonder what is coming next, if you deserve to have it, if you really want it, if you are ready to take the risk. Most writers I know are sensitive people. You might let the waiting become too heavy, too much. You might let it push you toward despair.
Ideally you will learn to enjoy waiting, at best, and to treat it as an exercise in trust, at worst. As writers, without trusting the outcome of your work, you’re all too susceptible to doubt and despair.
Why?
Because after fulfillment and acceptance, what comes next? Eventually the blush fades, the high recedes, and you are back to writing. At the end of the day all that matters is loving the work. The work is all you have. Sometimes it leads to validation and publication; sometimes it leads to a deep feeling of inner satisfaction.
You must train yourself to use the waiting time as work time so you won’t waste that time worrying, lamenting, or stressing. If you’re submitting stories to magazines or queries to agents, keep the cycle going. Submit, work. Submit, work.
Keep producing, gnashing, stretching, refining, testing, polishing, and most of all: persisting.
I know, I know, saying you have “too much time” is like saying you have “too much money” or that your car is “too new.” If this is a problem of yours, not many will sympathize. But it absolutely can become a roadblock to writing if you are prone to procrastination or distraction. When I quit my last “real job” a decade ago, on my first work-at-home day I sat in front of my computer and stared at it nervously as if I were on a blind date. I had freelance articles, editing jobs, and fiction all waiting for me, but I could attend to none of them. For a brief time, without a boss, a schedule, or a deadline, I floundered: I got up and dug in my garden, made lunch, took a walk, and finally, right at the end of the day, just before my husband came home, I plowed into the work.
Only to run out of time.
It took me several weeks to strike up a good working rhythm. If you are one of those lucky people who has too much time, try to see it as a blessing and not a curse. But keep in mind that your projects won’t magically organize themselves. Your writing won’t threaten you with punishment for not doing it. Only you can hold you accountable. Try prioritizing as follows.
At the end of the day, you have exactly as much time as you allow yourself. I know mothers of five who’ve squeezed writing into two-hour nap sessions for years, writers with full-time and more-than-full-time jobs who’ve written novels on their lunch breaks, and writers who rise before the sun does or long after the family has tumbled into slumber. The time is there, waiting for you to dig it up like a long-buried treasure.
1. Make a list of all the “possible” time slots in your day that you could devote to writing but aren’t. Or make a list of the distractions you have in place that could be pushed aside to make way for writing. Ignore the voices that say, “It’s too hard” or “It won’t happen.” Now look at your list and pick two time slots in which you can write or two distractions you can replace with writing time.
2. Select from one of these fantastic apps that don’t allow you to access the Internet within set times or only allow access within certain parameters (such as allowing you to only access certain sites). This will prevent the temptation to go online to peruse your Twitter feed or a friend’s blog when you’ve committed to writing.
When you take a break to stretch, the most overlooked parts of your body are those that probably do the most work: your hands! Pick one or several of the following exercises for your stretch break.