by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
Some people in the writing world think it’s hardest to get started. And it’s true that it’s hard to get started. But it’s also true that it’s hard to stay started, especially if you’re a parent.
I go through these cycles where I think about how my boys are just growing up so fast. Husband and I just moved the baby, who is nine months old, to his crib, and he’s our last one, so we sat in our bed getting all teary-eyed, because he’s the last baby we will ever have in our room, forever, and that feels significant and sad. And of course then I started thinking about how I’m using so many moments when I’m with the boys to work on email lists and to edit submissions and to edit other books, and maybe I should be spending that time playing and looking into their eyes and just enjoying who they are today without tomorrow and business and expectations stealing them from me.
When we’re parents, we can start to feel some guilt for pursuing a dream in all the spaces, because shouldn’t the spaces be reserved for our children?
But what I circle back to every time these thoughts start haunting me is that life and a dream are interconnected. When we are living life from the pursuit of our dream, we are living a real, authentic life. When we are pursuing a dream in the spaces of our lives, whatever that may look like right now, we are serving our dream. They both inform each other, and they’re both tangled around each other. They cannot be separated.
If I were to quit pursuing my writing dream tomorrow, I would not be a pleasant person to live with. I write to make my world clear, to preserve my most sacred memories, to make sense of my frustrating and joyful and disheartening and victorious experiences. If I didn’t have that outlet, my family—my children—would know. In fact, they did, for several years before I made my dream-pursuit a real possibility after I grew tired of watching it wave at me as it flew on by. I’m a much different person when I’m pursuing my creative interests. I’m a better wife, a more patient mother, a more whole person because of my writing.
Our writing enriches our lives. Our lives enrich our writing.
So we can talk about balance all day long, but what it really comes down to is integration. How can we integrate our creative pursuits with our lives? How can we integrate our lives with our creative pursuits?
How can we become a more whole person?
You’re the only one who can answer those questions, because it looks so very differently for all of us. But it’s worth answering them. For our families and for us.
Here are some ways we can find integration in our art and our lives:
1. Create with our families.
Maybe this looks like sitting around a table every night and writing in journals together. Maybe it looks like incorporating storytelling into our everyday life. Maybe it looks like brainstorming with children when we’re stuck on a plot line, because other people (especially children) have really great ideas, if we’re willing to dig down to those diamonds and really listen. Maybe it looks like writing a picture book together.
This summer my boys and I wrote pictures books together. My boys are still working on the pictures, but, eventually, they will finish, and we will publish, and they will have books published at the ages of 8, 6 and 5. That’s a pretty powerful experience for children—to know that their art matters.
Our family life can become our dream-pursuit life, too, even if it’s just in a casual way for now and someday becomes something more serious.
2. Find the spaces and give some of them (not all of them) to dream pursuit.
Our lives are better lived when we are pursuing a dream in some of the spaces. Children need some of our space, of course, because they are growing and we are their parents, and we will want to give them time and attention, since we know that our writing is richer for the life experiences we collect on a daily basis. But we cannot give every space to our regular life (especially things like laundry and dishes and cleaning bathrooms, since procrastination often lives in those things), just like we cannot give every space to our dreams. When I worked full-time and decided to write a book, my house didn’t get cleaned for a whole year. I gave myself permission to exist in a dirty (but not unsanitary) house, because the dream was waiting to be pursued.
3. Talk about our dreams with the people who share our lives.
Kids are great dreamers, and it’s worthwhile to talk to them about our dreams. Sometimes they are incredibly generous and will come up with things like, “I’ll take care of my brothers while we’re watching a movie if you want to work on a project,” like my 8-year-old did the other day. It was generous of him to offer his time to watch his brothers (even if I didn’t take him up on it—because he’s only 8), but as they get older, they get to enter into this dream with us and try to figure out ways they can help us shape it into the spaces.
If our kids never know what we’re trying to do, they will never know how they can help. And if they never know we’re dreaming in the first place, they will never know it’s okay to have their own dreams. We talk about our dreams regularly with our children, because it’s so important to our family life. We do Dream Sessions once a quarter to make sure our children know what dreams are and how important they are to a life.
4. Understand that there are seasons.
Sometimes there are season where life takes all the spaces. And sometimes there are seasons when writing demands all the spaces. Right now I’m working on deadline to finish a memoir by the end of the year, which means that I am working diligently during Family Movie Night to finish it. But there’s also an end date to that arrangement. The arrangement only stands until the memoir is finished. After that, I will be able to sit beside my boys and watch a movie with them.
There was a season, about a year ago, when our oldest was struggling with some anxiety issues, and I found myself unable and unwilling to write until we could sort through things with him and get to the very bottom of it, because my boy needed me. And then I had to write to sort out all my own feelings about what had happened. And then I had to spend more time with him. And then I had to write again.
So the seasons come and go. As long as we keep in mind that they are not forever, that this time we have or don’t have to create is not forever, we will be able to move and flow with the seasons of life.
5. Let go of the guilt.
Easier said than done, I know. Especially in the beginning, we will feel a lot of guilt about how we’re trying to pursue writing when our children are still waiting to be raised. Is it selfish? Is it ridiculous? Is it irresponsible?
No. We are writing to become whole, and this ALWAYS serves our children. We are doing what is best for all of us. And that’s worthy. It’s enough.
Guilt has no place here.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
I recently launched a poetry book called This is How You Know.
Before the launch, I did all kinds of research on product launches, consuming everything I possibly could to learn how to do this kind of thing in an effective way. I studied the work of product launch guru Jeff Walker and took extensive notes and made a plan and had evening meetings with my husband after the kids were in bed so we could try to create something that would interest people and encourage them to support my career as an author.
For the launch, I released three pre-launch videos, spaced a week apart so that, from start to finish, they spanned three weeks. The first video was met with some excitement from people who read me regularly and were happy to finally see a book on the market. The second one was met with fewer views. The third was met with hardly any views at all.
All of that lack of response made me feel guilty that I was “pushing” the videos on people, because at the end of them, what I was really trying to do was sell interest in my poetry book. And then came the launch week, and my husband, who is a content marketer and branding consultant, told me I’d have to kill it on social media and my email list, letting people know about the book and trying to get sales, and I groaned aloud.
We don’t always like to sell ourselves, do we?
I would much rather have someone else sell me. I would much rather have someone else talking about how much my book will help others. I would much rather defer to others when it comes to spreading the word.
It’s true that every week I give more than 5,000 words in free content away, but sometimes it seems like I’m trying to sell that, too, because I’m posting it on all the social media channels, and I’m letting people read the stuff that will eventually form the basis for book material, so it always feels like they’re doing me a favor by reading and sharing it.
But the reality is that my words provide value. My words help make a murky world clear. My words have a tangible effect on people, bettering their lives or giving them information or just encouraging them with humor and truth. So I’m giving. I’m giving and giving and giving, every single week, day in and day out, and I’ve never sold a thing to anyone before this poetry book.
We can feel like we’re not doing what’s right, because no one really likes to be sold to, but the reality is that what we have, the message we carry, the product we’ve developed, has value, and it has the potential to change lives and minds and hearts, and this is a valuable thing to do—that providing transformation in the form of words. So what we’re really selling is not the actual book but the transformation that comes from reading it. And this is a valuable thing.
What we have to offer holds value, and we have to get over this idea that people are doing us a favor by reading it and sharing it, because no one’s going to do those kinds of things as a favor. Do we give out those kinds of favors, or do we share things when we find value in them?
If we’re going to make a career out of our writing, we’re going to have to get over this not wanting to sell our products, because if we believe that what we’re doing is valuable, then we’re going to have to communicate that value in order to get it in the hands of the people.
And the truth is, if we’re indie authors selling our 70,000-word book for $4.99, that’s not a whole lot to ask of the people who follow us. That’s about the same price as the Starbucks they probably had yesterday. They get a whole story that could change their lives or show them a deeper truth, which is more than Starbucks ever did.
Next week I’ll be talking about all the things I learned about product launches from this poetry book launch, and the week after that I’ll be talking about how we can get better at product launches. But for now, I wanted to get this out of the way: We have to become comfortable with selling ourselves if we’re ever going to make this a career.
Here are some ways we can do that:
1. Recognize that what we have to offer holds value.
Maybe it’s just an entertaining story. People love to be entertained, so our offering has value. Maybe it’s just truth wrapped in the veil of humor. Well, the world could do with a lot more humor, if you ask me, so it has value. Maybe it’s something you’ve learned along your journey. Not everyone has learned the same thing, so they will find value in what you have to share.
There are people who would tell you that if all you’re doing is writing stories about yourself, people will never be able to find value in what you do, because there’s not an actual takeaway that has “takeaway” flashing in gigantic neon lights. Don’t buy into that. Your story has value to people because it’s you, and the right people will be able to see that. So believe in your value and then sell.
2. Understand that what you’re selling is not you.
What I mean is that when I was selling This is How You Know, I was not selling me. I was selling an opportunity for my readers to participate in the mystic art of finding themselves in a book of poetry. If we open our eyes widely enough, I believe we can see ourselves in any story or poem or song or essay. There are snippets of truth that hide in our story, that can change our audience for the better, and that’s what we’re trying to sell—the benefit to the reader, not the product in and of itself. With This is How You Know, I told my readers that I hoped they could find a piece of themselves in the poetry that recorded my everyday comings and goings, as I have done with countless poets over the years.
And, at the end of the day, if people don’t buy my book, that doesn’t mean they don’t like me. That they don’t find me valuable. Writing is a subjective field to be in, anyway, and sometimes we can put a little too much of ourselves in it. It can feel as though if a person doesn’t like what we sell or if they don’t buy it, they’re essentially saying something about us. That’s a lie.
I am so much more than the sum of my products. I am so much more than the sum of my art. I am so much more than the sum of my stats and shares and likes. It’s not easy to see this truth when we’re only selling our book for $1.99 and we have thousands of friends on our social media sites, and surely they’ll buy it, even if they don’t have a Kindle or they don’t like reading ebooks or they don’t even like poetry, because it’s only $2 out of their pocket. Except they didn’t, and now I’m wondering why they don’t like me.
We just have to break free from this. Whether or not we sell well does not change who we are.
3. Remember we are helping people.
It definitely isn’t easy to wrap our heads around this one when what we’re selling is entertainment, as in humor or even some narrative nonfiction. The value proposition is a little subtler, so we have to dig a little. But it’s also true that the human experience needs entertainment, and so we are really selling something that will brighten the world and make it more beautiful or fun or interesting. That doesn’t seem like such a hard sell.
4. Know we can’t give away free stuff forever.
This is really the long and short of it. If we’re interested in taking our writing from hobby to career, we have to get comfortable with selling things. It takes work to get there, but every product we launch is giving us more practice in the process.
So launch.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
By default, I’m a pretty competitive person. Put me in front of a board game with my husband and sister and brother-in-law, and I will try to tear it up in the winner’s circle (mostly, though, I just want to beat my husband). It’s not about proving my worth or declaring I’m best; it’s just something ingrained in my personality—doing my best at whatever I try.
This inherent characteristic can come back to bite sometimes when I sink into the comparison game. I start thinking I’m the one losing, because that person over there is so much more successful and doing so much better at building their audience than I am. There must be nothing left for me. Maybe I should just quit playing the game. Maybe I should find something else to do. Maybe I should stamp “Just not for me” on a silly dream.
When I fall into this black hole, I have to work hard to climb back out. I have to work even harder to convince myself that the only competitions we have is ourselves.
The only person we’re competing against is the person we were yesterday. The only writer we’re competing against is the writer we were last week, and the way to win this game is to improve day by day, week by week, month by month. That means getting better at word counts, at our writing technique, at the schedule we keep that maximizes all the hours we have in the most effective way we can.
There is no room for us to look at some other writer’s word count and think, “I must not be playing this game right, because he’s beating me by 10,000,” because the only writer whose word count we should be worried about is our own. Are we writing more words this week in the time we had than we wrote last week? Are we writing more efficiently today than we did a month ago? Are we expressing our ideas more clearly than we did a year ago?
Then we’re winning.
What I have to often remind myself is that we’re not playing against each other in the writing world. We’re all on the same team. And if we think we’re not, then we’re not going to make many friends in this business. And I may be a little biased, but I think writers are some of the coolest friends ever.
Some of my favorite people are the writers who so generously give away their tips and tricks for producing more words or helping me get to the next step of my career, who know and understand that we are not in competition with each other.
This can seem like a revolutionary concept, that there is no real competition, because don’t we all share products in this digital world that is overfilled with content?
Well, maybe I’m just idealistic, but I like to think that if a reader is paying attention to one writer, they will be more interested in paying attention to other writers, too. It doesn’t mean that my audience can’t become your audience or that your audience can’t become my audience. There are so many people in this world. There are enough to go around.
Let me say that again: THERE ARE ENOUGH TO GO AROUND.
There will always be someone, somewhere, who could learn something from you. There will always be someone who will find value in what you say. There will always be someone who will love you and your work.
If we can’t seen one another as fellow friends and colleagues along the journey toward lending the world beauty with our words, then we will miss out on the beauty of community. It’s in community that we become who we were made to be.
So compete with yourself. It’s a better-matched competition anyway.
How to compete with yourself:
1. Keep detailed logs of your word counts.
Lately I’ve been keeping logs of how many words I write for each of my projects and tallying them up at the end of every day. I’ve only done this for a couple of weeks, but I’ve steadily been adjusting my work and increasing my word counts, and this is super helpful as a writer with very limited time.
That said, some weeks we will obviously write more words than others. Those weeks we log 39,000 words are followed by a week with only 20,000 words, but that doesn’t mean that we are stalling (or moving backward) in our improvement. I try to think in terms of rough draft and final draft words. Rough draft words are easier to crank out. Final drafts take a little more time and effort. So keep track of both, and see if you’re getting better at each.
2. Learn all you can about this game.
I’m always reading books on structure and plot and characterization and business, because I believe that if we’re not always getting better, then we’re just getting stale. We should always pursue resources that will make us better writers, whatever that looks like in our lives. Compete against other weeks in how much you learn.
This is strategy. We can’t win against who we used to be if we’re not always trying to learn more and grow into better writers.
3. Set your own goals, without worrying about anyone else’s.
The reality is that your journey is your own personal journey. Maybe you have two kids. Maybe you have five. Maybe you work a full-time job. Maybe you’re doing writing full-time. Maybe you just got married. Maybe you live alone. All of those factors affect how many words you can write in any given week. So set your own word count goals, and don’t worry about anyone else’s. At the end of a week, assess how you’re meeting your goals and whether they need to be adjusted and how you feel about them (because if we’re stressing ourselves out with our goals, then they aren’t really effective goals at all).
4. Keep a writer journal.
I write in a writer journal most nights, or at least most writing nights (I don’t write on the weekends. It’s my family time). I write about how writing felt today, what I’m learning, things I really want to improve on and how I might turn those weaknesses into strengths. Sometimes I even work out plot lines in a less-formal way. I only write about 200 or 300 words every night, but those words have been great for helping me remember ideas and work out problems and analyze how that particular word count goal made me feel a little too stressed that week. Writer journals help us keep records we can refer to for years and years. I find this helpful.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
As writer parents, we may not have much time to write. I do most of my writing in 18 hours a week, and that’s probably stretching it for most parents—especially if you work another job.
But I used to do it for only 30 minutes a day. One thing that that helped me immensely with my limited time was brainstorming.
Some writers shake their heads at brainstorming. They don’t want to be put in a box. They want to go where the story goes. They want to use the freshest voice to tell the best story, and they want to be surprised just like their readers.
I used to be that writer. And then I discovered, through an experiment that tracked daily word count, how much brainstorming can speed up my writing. So now I use it all the time.
For my nonfiction work, I keep a brainstorming notebook readily available at all hours of the day. In it is a running list of all the blogs and essays I plan to write in the next week.
I don’t write on weekends, because I’ve chosen to spend my weekends with my children, but I always record in my brainstorm journal all the essays I plan to write in the coming week—the topics I’m exploring, the tone I’d like to take, the thoughts I’ve already had about them. I take this notebook everywhere with me, and when I’m sitting in my car waiting for my kids to get buckled, I look at the list and jot down random ideas. Sometimes they don’t even make any sense in terms of coherent writing. Sometimes they make perfect sense, but either way, I’ve found that when it comes time to write the articles, they are written in at least half the time.
I do things a little differently as a fiction writer. I used to fly by the seat of my pants. In fact, I’ve written three whole novels without a brainstorm. And then I started on a fantasy series that required lots of characters and lots of action, and I decided it would help keep everything straight if I just plotted it all out.
It took me about five hours to plot and plan about 20,000 words worth of brainstorm text, which will result in about 150,000 or more words of story. Because of all the effort I made to plan the story out, I worked much faster than I ever had. In an hour and a half I could log 6,500 words. That means if I was only writing on that story once a week for an hour and a half, I could end up with an entire rough draft finished in about 23 weeks—just a little more than five months. And if I worked on it more than once a week, it would get done even faster.
When I’ve written books without a brainstorm, the rough and final drafts have taken me longer. Mostly because the rough draft meanders, taking me to places that aren’t really needed in a final draft, and then I have to spend time cutting out large pieces of text and piecing together the rest. But in the process of brainstorming, you learn before you start writing what needs to stay and what can go. That’s valuable time saved.
Now. Brainstorming fiction doesn’t work for everyone. I totally get wanting to stay open with the writing and deciding you don’t really need a scene-by-scene synopsis before you start writing, but we’ll never know what works until we try it. For me, brainstorming has made my writing much, much faster, which is incredibly valuable as a parent pinched for time.
So if we’re parent writers and we’re limited on time, brainstorming might be something we want to try. Here are some things to remember before we brainstorm:
1. A brainstorm is not set in stone.
Just because the brainstorm says that A must happen and our character suddenly wants B to happen, that doesn’t mean we have to force the character to do A instead. We can defer to B, because characters usually know best. A novel doesn’t have to go by the book every single time, but if we’ve done our work brainstorming and getting to know our characters thoroughly before we even begin, we won’t likely be surprised a whole lot. It may still happen occasionally, but not often.
Sometimes, when I’m looking at a brainstormed nonfiction piece and it’s come to the day of the writing, I have a completely different idea about what I want to say. That’s okay. In that case, what the brainstorm helped me do is further clarify what I really wanted to say, which likely still saved me time and, inevitably, frustration.
2. Brainstorming will take some time, too.
But it’s not nearly as much time as writing a rough draft without a brainstorm, at least not in my experience. Mostly because when we’re just writing thoughts on a page, it’s going to take a few drafts to turn those thoughts and fragmented words into a final draft. If we’ve already gotten those fragments out in a brainstorm, our rough draft is going to look a whole lot like the final. What I’ve found when I’ve brainstormed an essay before I write it is that it doesn’t take very long to massage those rough draft words into a final draft, because they’re much more concise and polished from all the thinking I did beforehand.
But if we’re hoping that brainstorming will just eliminate the need to do a final draft, we’re going to be disappointed. We still have to put in the work to make our words the best they can be.
3. Leave adequate time between the brainstorm and the rough draft.
Time helps our subconscious work out any problems that we might meet on the screen or the page. Problems like wording or connection, because sometimes our brainstorms will come out random and unconnected and seemingly confusing. But when we allow space between the brainstorm and the rough draft, we can often work out all those problems before we even get to the actual writing. For my nonfiction essays, I try to leave at least a few days between a brainstorm and a rough draft and another day or two between a rough draft and a final (this means I have to work with a production schedule). For fiction I leave much longer periods of time, because it’s beneficial to take a longer break between drafts so you can read it with fresher eyes.
4. Brainstorming will feel hard at first.
I didn’t really know what to do with brainstorming at first. I didn’t know what I was supposed to write or how it was supposed to be done. But there is freedom in brainstorming, fortunately. There is no right or wrong way to do an effective brainstorm. No one will be able to tell us how, because it’s different for every person. Some people outline. I can’t stand outlining, so I basically dump. For nonfiction, I write points on my page, sort of like an outline but with no numbers. For fiction, I write in scenes, just jotting down all the scenes that will happen in a novel and then rearranging them in a way that makes sense (they might be rearranged later, too). I also do extensive character histories and analyses, because it gives more depth to y characters. I brainstorm all the possible settings for those scenes and everything necessary to create a new world, if I’m writing science fiction and fantasy. But when I first started, I didn’t know all this. I just wrote myself into a process that worked for me.
Don’t be afraid to find what works for you. And don’t believe that just because brainstorming feels hard it’s not for you. Keep trying. You’ll find your groove. And I think you’ll be glad you did.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
I have a full manuscript out with a couple of agents. I’ve been waiting two months to hear from them, whether or not they want the manuscript or will pass so I can try submitting to someone else. I’m getting impatient. Every day I check some of the agents I follow on Twitter to see what kind of books they’re tweeting that they want to see, and every day I see something that sounds perfect for this book I’ve written. That’s out with agents. Sitting in limbo.
So then one of them tweeted about a literary middle grade novel written in verse—which is exactly what mine is—and I thought, this is too good a chance to pass up, because most agents don’t want to see novels in verse, and here was one calling for that exact submission. So I put all my submission materials together and sent it all flying across the Internet, mentioning that I’d seen his tweet and I hoped my manuscript was what he was looking for.
Not even 24 hours later, he emailed his rejection.
It knocked the breath out of me. It really did. Because he had tweeted what he wanted, and I thought I was giving him exactly that, because this novel is GREAT, and it’s interesting and it’s got the potential to change some lives in the literary sense.
And because my book was exactly the genre, exactly the format, exactly the description of what he wanted I let myself believe that his rejection meant that something was wrong with the writing mechanics. Maybe I hadn’t done as good a job as I thought communicating and crafting my story. Maybe the writing fell flat. Maybe it was really terrible, and here I was thinking it had a chance.
Except I know that none of that is true. I know it, because in seven query letters sent out, I’ve had four full manuscript requests, which has NEVER happened with any of my other stories. I know the writing is good. I know the story is great. I know the main character is lovable and quirky and mysterious and everything a lead character should be. So why did this guy pass on it so quickly?
Well, there are a lot of answers to that.
Rejection is hard. So many times we can take it so personally. Agents say “it’s just not right for my list right now,” and what we hear is, “You’re just not a good enough writer for my list.” Agents say “I don’t believe this is a good fit,” and we hear, “I don’t believe you’re a good fit.” Agents say “I’m going to have to pass,” and we hear, “It’s not any good.”
But what I’ve learned more surely from this experience is that some people will love what we write and some just won’t. There’s nothing we can do about that. If we try to please them all, we’d never have a book.
All rejection really means is that our project is not right for that one person. It doesn’t mean (necessarily) that it will never be right for anyone, ever. It doesn’t mean that we will never get traction with the project we poured ourselves into for an entire year. It doesn’t mean we have written for nothing.
Many factors influence whether or not an agent accepts a project or passes on it. Sometimes they have a similar project already in the queue, and they know it would be hard to sell two of them back-to-back. Sometimes they don’t connect well with the story, for personal reasons. Sometimes they’re looking for a very specific kind of book and yours just happens to be off by one tiny little detail.
Sometimes they don’t have the contacts that would sell your novel in the most efficient way, and even though they recognize it’s good, they’ll pass because they want you to get the best sale. Agents understand that at the heart of a publishing career is a good connection between an agent, a writer and a publishing house. If they think they can’t sell the project in a way that’s most beneficial to the writer (which will most benefit them, too), they’ll pass.
These are all the things you don’t see in a rejection letter, because agents are busy and inundated with submissions every hour of every day. There’s no way to know who would be a perfect fit and who wouldn’t without trying.
We at least have to try. That’s what I did, and even though I got an almost immediate rejection and sat in a tailspin for a couple of hours, unable to even write, eventually I lifted my head and got back to work.
Rejection will not stop me. It shouldn’t stop any of us. We are writers, first and foremost. Of course we will keep writing.
So let’s pick ourselves back up. Let’s brush off the dirt that got on our knees. Let’s keep writing.
Here’s how to see rejection for what it’s worth:
1. Remember that you are not your work.
We can become so tied to our work that it begins to feel like it’s a vital part of us. We will never have an objective viewpoint if our work is part of us. So we have to separate ourselves from it and send it out into the world without any expectation for how it will be received. Easier said than done, I know.
It’s a precarious balance when we’re writers, because the writing that holds more of us will always be better, and yet we still have to fight for this separation so we don’t take rejection too personally and close up shop forever. We should always try again.
2. Listen to the rejections.
If all the agents who send you a rejection include a note about something similar in your story that made them stop reading or showed them the project wasn’t right for them, listen. Chances are, even if you choose to self-publish that particular book, your readers will probably feel the same (because agents are, at their simplest, just readers).
That doesn’t mean we should listen to all the words in a rejection letter. Most of the rejections for my adult literary novel had to do with it being a novel in verse. If I took it out of verse, they could sell it better, they said. They didn’t have the right contacts for it, but it was beautiful writing. The story was fantastic, but they would need prose, not verse.
I decided to self-publish, because I don’t like the idea of someone telling me no one wants to read an adult novel in verse. I like proving people wrong. But mostly because taking the novel out of verse would change it in ways that wouldn’t suit it, in my opinion. (This project hasn’t published yet, by the way. I’m sitting on it for a while.)
3. Keep all your rejections, but don’t dwell on them.
Sometimes agents might include a little caveat like, “If you ever have anything else to submit, let me know and I’d love to take a look at it.” Phrases like these are golden, because they mean the agent really liked your writing, but the project simply wasn’t right for them. So keep all those rejections for the next time you have a project you’d like to submit, and you already have a much more targeted list.
4. Go have a glass of wine.
Celebrate that you were brave enough to try.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life, This Writer Life Featured
I’ve had some trouble getting a handle on my schedule lately.
Part of it is because my boys are al home for the summer, so the time I normally have to work while they’re in school is virtually nonexistent. I still have large chunks of writing time, because my husband and I trade off kid-watching shifts so both of us can do our creative work, but I haven’t been maximizing the time in the most efficient way.
I write a crazy amount of content for all my blogs every week. Most of the blogging takes a total of three days (or workable hours for those days—which is about four hours a day). That’s a huge amount of time.
But I’ve been breaking up those blog writings into all five days of available work time. Which didn’t seem very efficient.
When we’re parents, we’re not often given huge amounts of time to write, which means we need to do whatever it takes to maximize our time. I didn’t want to just be producing content for my weekly posts. I wanted to also be getting somewhere on a couple of the books I have in the works, and just having four hours at the end of the week was not cutting it.
So I decided to reevaluate my time.
I looked at where I was spending time and what all I was doing each week to see if I could group like things together (like a blog day and a newsletter day and a “pitching stories” day).
And then I tried an experiment.
Here’s a sample of what my schedule looked like:
12:30-1:45 p.m.: Write story roughs
1:45-2 p.m.: Post on social media (platform work)
2-2:30 p.m.: Write Messy Monday post
2:30-3 p.m.: Submit Huff Post blog
3-4 p.m.: Write/schedule This Writer Life blog
4-5 p.m.: Write/schedule Crash Test Parents blog
5-5:30 p.m.: Read.
I had the highest word count I’d ever logged in a week (nearly 25,000 words).
It was much more efficient than my old schedule.
I’m a proponent for working in whatever time you have, even the short bursts, which is what I used to do before my time opened up a little more. I believe we can train ourselves to work in those short bursts and in the margins of time we have as parents.
But when our time does open up, why wouldn’t we wan to reevaluate and see if we could streamline our time so it’s most efficient for the season we’re in?
Schedules are critically important to write, because if we don’t have writing time scheduled, chances are we aren’t going to get it done. So much can come in the way of our writing—kids who need something that’s not necessary right this minute, other people asking us to do things for them (especially if we work from home when a spouse is at home), phone calls or social media that could wait until later, when we’re not so pressed for time.
My old schedule also left little room for margin. So when something unexpected did happen—a boy interrupting and I’d get thrown off what I was saying in the final draft of an essay—I would run over the scheduled time for that particular writing. And because everything was lined back-to-back (to ensure the most efficient use of time), ending a task late meant I would start the next task late.
So I worked in some margin. (Generally it doesn’t take me a whole hour to write an essay. Maybe 50 minutes, which left an extra 10 minutes for the unexpected.)
When we find a schedule we like, reevaluation is not the first thing we think about doing. But it’s a practice we should work in, because every season of life changes. Our schedules need to be fluid to keep up with those ever-changing seasons.
When my boys go back to school, my time will feel a little more like mine, again, and the schedule will shift accordingly.
Here are some questions we can ask ourselves in the evaluating of our schedules:
1. Am I wasting any time?
Sometimes we don’t like to admit to this one. I know I don’t. But the truth is, sometimes a story feels really hard for now. Sometimes I need to take it back to the drawing board or let it sit. Evaluating those things help us assess where we might be pushing something that doesn’t want to be pushed just yet.
Other places we waste our time tends to be social media or the Internet. My husband likes to watch YouTube videos. The problem is, one video leads to another, and pretty soon you’ve wasted half an hour just watching videos.
The way I combat this tendency is to schedule “break” time and set a timer. The rest of the time, I focus only on work and close out all my Internet tabs.
My time is too precious to spend it clicking the next most interesting thing that comes along.
2. Is what I’m doing working?
This was the question I had to ask when I noticed how spread out my weekly blogs were. An hour here, an hour there, and I didn’t have any large chunks where I could just be writing my fiction stories. So I grouped all those blogs together, and now I have large chunks for fiction writing. I get to write my way into a state of flow and just stay there a while.
The thought behind my original disjointed schedule was that I didn’t want to become stale on those weekly blogs, so I needed to spread them out all on different days. But they’re all so different, written in different character and tone, that there wasn’t any danger that they would start sounding like each other.
It’s always important to reevaluate what’s working and what’s not. I do this at the end of every week, by comparing my word count and thinking back through the week to see where I could have been more efficient. If we want our writing to become more than just a hobby, it’s a good practice to have.
3. What could I do differently that might result in a larger word count?
I hadn’t really been paying attention to word counts until fairly recently. I usually write everything by hand, so I don’t tend to write all that fast when it comes to rough drafts.
I went back and calculated word counts for the week where my schedule was not as streamlined as it was this week, and the word count was about 7,000 words lower. That’s a pretty significant amount—enough to make me realize that I needed to do something to increase it.
Grouping like writings together had a significant impact on how many words I could turn out in a week, and that was helpful to see. I will continuously experiment to see what might result in the largest word counts (and not just word counts—but also the best kind of writing. Because large word counts doesn’t always mean good word counts.).
As parents with limited writing time, it’s necessary for us to continue streamlining our schedules and figuring out what works best for us in the season we’re in. Seasons change, and our schedules should, too.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Don’t be afraid to streamline and change things up just because it’s worked for you all this time. You might just find that changing things up significantly increases your production.
But you’ll never know until you evaluate.
