Once upon a time, there was a person who wanted to be a writer. She wrote when she could, but writing life so often took a back seat to more “practical” demands of life. A day job or three, family and friends, basic realities of life necessary to keep the would-be author from an appearance of homelessness… all of it so much more functionally pressing than those long-simmering dreams of publication.
Sound familiar? *Raises hand…
All of us have extraneous demands on our time and attention that draw us away from our writing. Some are non-negotiable. In the grand scheme of things, if your writing isn’t already the primary source of income for your household, you need to keep the lights on, water running, roof up, and food on the table. Your personal network and variety of activity is a vital part of your wellbeing. Even we raving introverts need to connect with our loved ones, in carefully measured doses, of course. The most devoted of binge-watchers and couch potatoes need an active hobby to keep healthy.
The question becomes, then, one of priorities. If you want to make your writing a priority in your life, you need to define and view it as such, and balance it with your other priorities.
So much easier said than done.
Rule #1: Schedule Writing Time, and hold it Sacred
What do the other commitments in your life have? A sacred, untouchable place on your calendar. Your day job shift? Scheduled. Your kids’ classes and extracurriculars? Scheduled. Club meetings. Parties. Events. Vacations. You get the idea.
Scheduling time to be a writer places your writing on equal footing with your other priorities. The challenging difference is, for many of us, other scheduled commitments have external pressures to maintain our adherence to the schedule. Don’t go to work? No paycheck. Skip club meeting? Social shunning. Especially for amateurs and non-professional writers, the commitment to write often lacks an external pressure to meet that commitment, therefore it can be easy to skip an “appointment” with your project. Some useful hacks to prevent such skiving behaviors are:
- Find an accountability buddy. This hack creates external pressure. Share your goals and progress with a friend who also has a writing goal. Join (or found!) a writer’s club with physical or virtual meet-ups where like-minded writers can share their progress, encourage each other, and provide a support system for when life pushes back against your writing priorities.
- Share the fact of your writing priority with others. This hack packs a twofold punch. First, it creates an understanding and expectation for your activities during your time in the minds of your family and friends. Unless they are quite dense, they will recognize and respect the time you devote to writing. Secondly, if your support system knows what you’re doing, they tend to ask variations of “how is it going?” at intervals. These check-ins from the folks we hold dear and have our best interests in mind, even if they aren’t of a writerly bent, are remarkably helpful at keeping progress on track.
- Go full discipline. Set a calendar reminder alarm for your time to be a writer, and go sit down and do it. No, this approach doesn’t work for everyone, and depending on your personal “squirrel factor” you may need to take steps to minimize distractions, but that’s probably a whole separate discussion.
Scheduling time to be a writer might seem like a tall order in an already jam-packed schedule. Where does it fit in when one already feels “like butter scraped over too much bread?” This is the part where setting writing as a priority comes in. What is more important than writing? Less important? Watching the latest episode of your favorite show? Binge-watching every episode of Supernatural? Scrolling Facebook? Feeding the Twitter trolls? Changing the oil in your car? Your day job that keeps the lights on? Blogging? Mowing the lawn? Only you have the answers. But, when you strip away the things that you spend time on that you don’t define as a priority, you’ll find time to devote to your writing goals.
Rule #2: Consistency is Key
One of the most important things to remember when creating and nurturing a writing habit is consistency. Consistency sets you up for success, and over time primes your brain for writing time. If you always sit down to write at, say, 7:30 pm after dinner, that becomes ingrained in your routine, right alongside “leave for work at 8:00 am” and “lunch at noon.” Calendar blocking and reminder alarms are perfect, especially in the beginning stages of forming a habit of consistently showing up to write at the same time each day.
Consistency is important in terms of place, too. If you always tend to write in the same place, your brain will tend to associate that place with the purpose that you have given it – writing. Do you tend to make as much progress when you sit with your laptop on the living room couch while your partner is watching TV next to you? Your brain is probably primed for couch-potato-ing in that location. Do you tend to get words down as effectively sitting in bed? Your brain might wonder if you should be working or sleeping. All of us are individuals, and your place may be odd, comparatively speaking… but as a general rule, “a place for everything and everything in its place” holds for verbs as well as nouns.
Consistency also has some grace built-in. Something that has been game-changing for me is the realization that I can be consistent without being in hero-mode every time. Sometimes consistently writing means it’s a busy evening, and a get a few lines of dialog down and that’s it before I need to leave my desk again. But, even when life means we can’t get three glorious chapters down in one sitting, getting a few ugly lines down is better than no progress at all. The Japanese have a word for this: Kaizen, the idea of small and continuous improvements. Contrast this concept with the alternative… a burst of activity and progress over a short time, then the project stagnating for an extended window without touching it. Yep, I’ve definitely been there, too.
Rule #3: Remember that Writing is More Than Writing, Kind Of
Yeah, I see you scratching your head, there.
Writing, and making progress on your writing projects doesn’t necessarily always mean getting x number of words on paper. Unless it’s NaNoWriMo… Anyway, when you are feeling stuck in terms of word flow, it can often be helpful and productive to tackle writing from a different angle. Flesh out a character sketch or your plot outline, get a better feel for your setting, take some notes relating your research to its place in your story. All of these activities are definitively part of the writing process and bring you closer to completing your project. Often, these activities will jog the process of getting words on paper forward again. It counts.
Rule #4: Be Realistic
This rule is critical. As the saying goes, don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress.
When you are scheduling your time to be a writer, be realistic about your availability and the balance you need to maintain with your other commitments. Don’t kid yourself into thinking you’re going to write on all 365 days in a year. Grant yourself the grace and deny yourself the guilt of not getting words on paper on Christmas Day, or your birthday, or the weekend of your kid’s travel baseball tournament in Kalamazoo. Your other non-negotiable priorities have built-in vacation days for these things, allowing you to show up fully on regular days. Your writing should be no different.
Grant yourself a number of “sick days” to give your schedule flexibility for emergencies that take you away from your writing. Stuff happens. Take it in stride, apply the grace of a sick day, and pick up where you left off when the emergency is managed.
The schedule is critical, but remember not to enslave yourself to it – it is your creation as much as your stories are! You get to create it! Schedule the day that you want to have, the day that brings you closer to your goals! Then stick to it!
Conclusion
It isn’t easy to be a writer in everyday life. Or, at all, for that matter. It demands that we prioritize our writing, place it on equal footing with the other elements of our lives that we do not allow to slip through the cracks. That prioritization demands that we have discipline, especially since failure to make writing progress may not carry immediate or tangible consequences for the amateur writer, as failure to show up to your day job does, for example.
Grant yourself grace, keep reminding yourself why being a writer is a priority in your life, and write on!
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