chapter 6
BUILD BOUNDARIES

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”

—CARL SANDBURG

Writing is such a silent, solitary endeavor that many people in your life may not even know that you write at all, much less how often or how much time and effort you devote to your craft. Even those with the best intentions may not understand that the long stretches of time you spend staring out the window are not “interruptible” but rather crucial artistic musings. Those who read your work may assume you churn out every piece in one sitting, with no clue as to the number of hours, the agony, and the investment you devote to even the shortest essay. As such, you can’t rely on people in your life, be they best friends or colleagues, to know how precious your writing time and energies are. That’s on you.

A big part of building a lasting writing practice means not negotiating your writing time out of obligations, guilt, fear, friendship, or other reasons. It means talking about your writing as the powerful, purposeful, entertaining, beneficial work that it is. It’s easy to tell yourself it’s frivolous and inconsequential, particularly if it doesn’t yet produce an income or attract readers, but that is the lie of the ego, which does not have your best interests at heart.

Remember your Writer’s Code? That’s more than a promise to yourself; it’s a contract—a binding contract you will regret breaking. But don’t despair: Your writing practice is a changeable, fluid creature. It ebbs and flows, squeezes down to the size of a pea, and then expands to fill multiple universes. A writing practice is ongoing as long as you always keep a part of yourself invested in it, give it just enough water to stay alive during the difficult times, and tend it into hearty fruition at the best of times.

It’s easy to be swept up in the instant gratification of our entertainment culture. Everything’s on demand, which makes writers feel that they must be, too. Many authors turn out a book a month to please serial readers, while others bust tail to put out a book a year to keep their publishers happy. I’d rather you look for inspiration from writers like Donna Tartt, author of The Goldfinch and two other novels, who produces one masterful, compelling book every eight to ten years. This is not to suggest that you must write at her pace but that you train your mind to see all your efforts as words that funnel into the larger body of your writing practice. The investment you make in time, practice, patience, and persistence will show in everything you do.

And really, let’s put this into perspective: At the end of your life, do you think you’ll be happier that you worked more hours at your day job, listened to someone else’s advice for your writing, read someone else’s manuscript, or frittered away time online … or that you gave yourself more time and energy to write? Yes, it’s a rhetorical question, but the point is that it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day pressures of life.

CREATE A DO-NOT-DISTURB ZONE

Chapter four gave you strategies to carve out and commit more time to your writing. But once you carve it out, you need to learn to protect it. Your writing time is work time, and it counts. A writer I knew used to put up a “Writer Working” sign at her office door at home so that there was no question in the minds of her husband and children as to when she was in the do-not-disturb zone.

It’s easy to tell yourself you can write and be available to your children, or that you can write while watching television, or that you’ll get to it after you listen to your friend’s woes (and, hey, all of those are legitimate activities). But harking back to our “object in motion” law of the last chapter, I guarantee that the “other” activity will quickly take precedence. Personally I find that my mind could easily become addicted to television, videos, YouTube, and Facebook. If I focus on one of those things, I won’t easily pull away.

Show your family and friends (and, frankly, yourself) that you’re serious by taking concrete steps to set up your writing space. Make your own “do not disturb” or “writer at work” sign, or tidy up that heap of old mail on your desk and hang up some art over it. Once you delineate the physical boundaries of your writing space, the energy boundaries will follow with ease. You can point your family to the clean desk or new sign and open a dialogue about when they can expect to find you working and how they can go about contacting you when you’re in your zone.

Writing is an act of focused attention, and that doesn’t come easily. I find that it takes a bit of restless motion—pacing my office, shuffling papers—and false starts before I really get “stuck into” the writing, a phrase I take from my friend Alegra. If you’re only giving it the “continuous partial attention” I’ve written about, you’re treating it the way my childhood best friend and I used to clean her room: by shoving all the toys and mess into the closet and under the bed, which is to say you’re not really doing it at all.

BUILD ENERGY BOUNDARIES

Some people in your life add to your personal well of creative energy, while others steal it—intentionally or not. Do you know how to identify when someone is draining your personal well? If you feel tired, discouraged, negative, or depressed after spending time with that person, there’s a good chance he or she is what I call an “energy sucker.” Some of these people may be family members, co-workers you have to see on a regular basis, or long-time friends. I’m not here to advocate that you cut those people out of your life—but you should protect your writing energies from them. Writing energy is gossamer and fragile in its early stages. New ideas, fledgling courage, and burgeoning possibilities can be especially susceptible to energy suckers. These are not the people you want to share your early drafts or bold first steps with. Energy suckers will take the breath right out of your fledgling ideas and can even steal from your sense of value as a writer. You must learn to identify these people in your life and keep them separate until you and your writing are stronger. Think of them as germs that you must shield your newborn baby—your writing—from.

Until you’re sure of a person’s effect on your writing energies, don’t chance having your energy distracted; stick to your Creative Support Team for company, sharing, and feedback.

LEARN TO SAY NO

Writers need each other, and most rely on each other for everything from feedback to cheerleading. If you keep at the writing game long enough, you will inevitably be called on to offer help, assistance, blurbs, critiques, referrals, and more to other writers. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll feel that it is your duty to say yes at every turn, both because you want to help and because you may need to call in favors of your own in the future. (In chapter seven, I’ll talk about ways to successfully serve and give as a writer.)

Here’s the thing: Eventually you need to say no. If you are madly writing and someone wants you to stop and read his manuscript, you may need to say no. Or just “not now.” Interrupting your own rhythms doesn’t serve your practice.

As author and research scientist Brenè Brown says, “Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.”

Her point is that it’s far better to disappoint someone for a good reason than it is to carry inevitable resentment, and lose time and energy, from having said yes. Your friend or colleague will get over her disappointment, but you’ll carry the resentment for a long time. And resentment is counterproductive to creative energy.

Besides, saying yes to too many nonwriting projects is a form of both procrastination and self-sabotage that you just don’t have time for.

PLUG ENERGY LEAKS

I could write an entire book on the ways we leak our creative energy, and those ways have little or nothing to do with people in our lives. In the end, you are always responsible for finding and patching these leaks inside yourself and for saying no and setting boundaries. Here are a few other ways you might be leaking creative energy.

• MULTITASKING. Remember, your brain can focus on one cognitive task at a time. You may believe you’re doing three things, but you’re actually doing three things halfheartedly and most likely will end up with three incomplete projects.
• RESEARCHING. If you need to research for a book or an essay, do it at a time that is not earmarked for writing. Research is a seductive way to procrastinate, too.
• SOCIALIZING. Making a “quick call” or shooting off “a quick e-mail” to have someone help you with your writing project generally leads to not writing. Answering the phone or the front door or saying hello to a friend across the café are also likely to lead to a loss of writing time. The only exception for socializing while writing is if you’re texting a friend to say, “Stretch break” or “Meet me at the coffee shop for a writing date.”
• CLEANING YOUR HOUSE. File any house-cleaning chores under “procrastinating” if they coincide with your writing time. Houses will always become messy again, and though I understand the “orderly house, orderly mind” concept, your writing time is nonnegotiable and not interchangeable with house-cleaning time.
• ORGANIZING. Similar to cleaning, save organizing for its own time slot.
• MARTYRING. Yes, I know this isn’t a verb; bear with me. If you believe you are raising yourself to a noble position of suffering by putting off your writing for someone else, particularly an energy sucker, I promise you it won’t be worth it. Your suffering won’t be noble, the writing will go undone, and the person you devoted your time and energy to will not appreciate it. The truth is, your noble martyr time will only last a brief while, and then it will give way to resentment and frustration and creative emptiness. If you use helping someone else or putting someone else’s needs first as a justification for not writing, in truth you’ve helped no one. You didn’t write, and you’ll now be frustrated with the friend in need. Be especially careful of this dynamic with “energy suckers” who don’t see your writing as important; the more you do for them at the expense of your own writing and energy, the more you are cheating yourself.

AVOID BINGE WRITING AND WORKAHOLISM

The last thing I ever want to do is discourage a writer from writing. I think most of you probably fall into the category of writers that need encouragement and motivation to write. But some of you will need to build better boundaries around … yourself. That is, you need to rescue yourself from habits that exhaust you and steal your energy: for instance, those of you who, once you allow yourself to write, don’t stop. You may binge write, staying up at all hours of the night, losing sleep, running on caffeine and sugar for several days, and then inevitably crashing. That’s not healthy. There’s no need to buy into the stereotype of the wild or mad writer, particularly if you have a career, family, or other set of responsibilities. If you live in a cabin or are independently wealthy, or have been given carte blanche by those in your life to write all the time, then by all means, carry on. But in general, you can’t sustain a writing practice by working until you burn out.

If you are binge writing, I daresay you’re probably not carving out the time to write in a regular, healthy way. Instead you steal from your rest time, your family time, and your work time, and you end up paying the price. These are the kinds of things that get people to work against you, set up a false sense of persecution, and prevent your writing from being respected, all of which leads to a whole other set of complex issues.

The solution is to be honest with yourself about how you spend your time. Circle back to chapter four and carve away the distractions that aren’t working for you, and commit to your writing in healthy, manageable sittings. You, your writing practice, and your loved ones will appreciate it.

WORK IT

Make a circular graph. (Don’t worry, there’s no math involved, I promise. I’m a writer, not a mathematician.) First, draw a big circle that fills up a full page. Then draw two more circles of decreasing size so that you have what looks like a rudimentary bull’s-eye.

Fill in names of people closest to you, or with whom you have to interact frequently, in the various circles. Write the names of your Creative Support Team in the innermost circle. In the next ring, write the names of “safe people”—those who do not steal energy from your creative self. In the next ring, write the names of people who you might call unreliable—sometimes they steal time, sometimes they don’t, so you aren’t going to label them “safe.” And finally, outside the circle, put those who steal your time, energy, or worse.

The point of this exercise isn’t to shame anyone, and I certainly don’t think you should share this with the people you’ve listed. But this chart will give you a good look at who supports and who detracts from your writing practice. It’s a real examination of the people you need to keep further from your writing practice and those you know you can bring close. If you have made a date to write in the afternoon and an “unreliable” or “uncertain” friend wants to pop in for an unscheduled visit, you may remind yourself that it’s not a good idea.

MOVE IT

Alegra is a fellow writer, one of my best friends, and a solid member of my Creative Support Team. She and I have had many discussions about what happens when energy-sucking people drain our vitality or when a bad feeling lodges inside us, brought on by one of the various travails of a writer’s life. We’ve both discovered the magic in “releasing the stuckness” from our bodies through some sort of physical activity. Ironically, when your energies have been drained or stolen from a lack of boundaries, you need to replenish the body first before the mind will follow suit.

For the purposes of this chapter, in which you’re taking a look at your energy leaks, we’re going to do a replenishing exercise during your stretch break. This is basically a series of movements taken from yoga. But don’t worry; you don’t have to be a yogi to reap the benefits. Below is a graphic of the “sun salute” in yoga. Do these poses only in so far as you are comfortable. Don’t push past comfort, and be sure to breathe as you go.

Illustration by Victoria Faye of Whit & Ware Design