by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Writing, at the very heart of it, is a bearing witness to the events of a life, to the thoughts of a writer, to the struggles and setbacks and the hopes and dreams of humanity.
That’s why it’s important to tell the truth in our writing.
We look around our world today, and we can see all the places where truth-telling is not, in fact, celebrated. There is social media, where we curate a world that works best for us. There is ourselves, which we curate, too, so that others will like or admire us. There are blogs and stories and marketing and ads and testimonials that have only the faintest ring of truth.
I like to tell the truth. I use truth-telling in my fiction and nonfiction, because I believe that the world needs more brave baring. It’s not unusual that someone in my life will say, “Maybe you shouldn’t talk about that,” because they’re afraid of what it might share about me personally, but the only way to unlock the chains of the people in this world is to bear witness the best way we know how: telling our own stories.
People, especially in this world, want to know they’re not alone, and we can do that, as writers, by opening our lives and letting them see us. And because there are so few people doing it, because our world is a shiny, pretty world, we can be sure that people will be drawn to the truth we’re telling.
When I feel that resistance (should I share this story about when I yelled at my kids?) I always bring it back to this: Sometimes it’s just nice to know we’re not alone.
It’s nice to know that other people have the same kind of struggles and the same issues and the same darkness in their hearts, that we are not as alone as we thought.
Sure, we’re encouraged to put our best foot forward, show all the beset parts of life, because who wants to follow a person who’s tripping up along the road?
I want to tell the whole truth. I want people to see themselves in my writing, and that means that if I’m not telling the truth about life, they won’t be able to find that thread of sameness. They won’t connect. And because I don’t offer something that’s of inarguable value, like a 5-step checklist for self publishing, if they don’t connect, if the stories I tell don’t ring true, you can bet those readers won’t come back.
In the world of fiction, we tend to want to coddle our heroes. We want them to come out okay in the end, but sometimes they need a little rumbling and rough treatment to come out even better. If we’re not willing to let them go there, we’re not going to connect with our audience, because no one wants to read a story about a brother who just loves his special needs brother so much and everything is great and there’s nothing at all that could improve in his world.
In the same way, in our nonfiction world, no one wants to read about people who have it all put together and never make mistakes and love their kids every minute of every day, because that’s always in our faces, everywhere we turn.
[Tweet “People are desperate to find something real. Something authentic. Something honest. We must tell our stories.”]
It’s not easy to do this as writers. Because we have to put our hearts out there, and there is no assurance of what people will do with our hearts once they’re out in the great big world, but if we know who we are, we’re not going to be as affected as we might be if we’re still searching. Maybe we’ll rumble a little with shame, because we all have places in our stories where we have let shame lock us in chains, but when we do, we get to share about that, too, and we get to let people see us, and we get to engage in real and genuine community.
[Tweet “Readers see their lives mirrored in our own, because we’re all pretty much the same. it’s the gift of humanity.”]
It’s not easy to tell the truth. To open our robes. To let the light in. But the bravery of our vulnerability will help others be brave.
Vulnerability is a little like walking out on a plank and stepping over the side, not knowing what’s waiting beneath it, but when we fall and go all the way under, we learn that we can swim here, too, in the barest of places. And eventually it will get easier. Eventually we will be addicted—because there is a relief, too, to telling the truth. We don’t have to keep up a ruse. We don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to be someone outside of who we are. How wonderful.
I can be part of the healing of humanity when I bare myself. I can let people know about my feelings and how I overcame this or that or how I didn’t at all, and, instead, failed in the hardest way. How I’m stuck. How I’m sad. How I’m determined to make it back out again. And in my telling, people find that they can feel and think and do the same.
[Tweet “The world needs more truth tellers.”]
How to be a truth teller:
1. Separate your art from your self.
Of course there will be people who come out in flocks to tell you all the things that are wrong with you after you bare your truth. But if we are fully centered and confident in who we are, we will know that their words don’t have any staying power. Sure, they may knock us down for a minute, but they’re not going to keep us down. They will hurt. Of course they will. I have some of the thinnest skin around. When people write ugly comments about the truths I’ve bared, I feel the flush of shame wash over me every time. But if we’re willing to rumble with that story and turn it around in our heads, we are better for it. We are known, and we, most importantly, know ourselves.
2. Start small.
We can start with small truths. How hard it is to write. How we sometimes get frustrated at our children for making it that much harder. How the baby wouldn’t sleep last night and we started feeling like maybe this would never work, ever, because how can you even write a coherent sentence when you haven’t had a decent three hours of sleep? Ease yourself into telling your truth and tell the smaller, easier things first.
I once shared an essay about how I wished I was expecting a girl instead of another boy, and I got quit a bit of lash back in some private places, but it was my truth, and there were also thousands who wrote to tell me that they were so glad for my honesty, because it made them feel less alone. If we’re interested in changing the world and helping others along in their journey, we’re going to have to get real.
3. Journal it first.
Sometimes it helps to journal our truth first, before we even come close to sharing it. Sometimes we have to settle ourselves into our truth, because maybe it was a little unexpected, that way we felt. When I’ve been journaling, sometimes I can look back and see the ways my mind has changed, and that helps me get some distance from the situation and share it, because I know that my mindset has changed and the ugly words people may say to Me Today are not about Me Today at all. That truth is still important, because there are people who are in the place we were yesterday, and they will find value in our truth-telling.
4. Start a confessional.
Not publicly, of course (unless you’re really feeling brave). Write your confessions in a journal and tuck it away in a private place. Pick and choose from this, and see what you might be able to share with others. It’s true that some people don’t enjoy sharing the darkest secrets of their lives (and, also, some stories are not ours to tell), but even if we can’t share all the deepest and darkest secrets, we can try to share more than just what’s all peachy and golden in our lives. The world has enough of that. I just have to look through my Facebook feed to remember.
5. Never tell the truth for the wrong reasons.
These would be reasons like vengeance or anger or to try to prove a point. We have to be careful when we’re telling our truths that we don’t have some ulterior motive in mind. We should only choose to tell the truth so that others will find their own healing in words. I always try to tell my truths with the deepest love in my heart for all the people involved. The best kind of truth telling is truth spoken in great love.
Unfortunately, no one can tell you what or how much to share or not share. You have to make that decision yourself. Only share what you’re comfortable with. Only share what you can share in love. Only share the story that is yours to tell.
Leave the rest alone.
This week’s prompt:
Write a story about an embarrassing moment as if you are a character in a book.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
[Tweet “One of the worst enemies of a writer is the need to produce perfect art.”]
Of course we want to produce perfect art. It is, after all, what we’re sending out into the world, and we can’t just send something out that has glaring mistakes and smells of poor execution and looks like a 5-year-old got a wild hair. Of course we will try our hardest to make something beautiful and legendary. Of course we will do everything we possibly can to make sure the world notices and agrees, Yes. This is good.
We’ll spend days that turn into weeks that turn into years revising and touching up and fixing this one little thing right here because it’s still not quite right, still not quite perfect. But the reality is, if we want to move forward in our writing career, we are going to have to put a stopping point somewhere. We are eventually going to have to launch our writing out into the world.
Don’t get me wrong. Revision is a grand thing. I love revision, even though it takes me much longer to revise than it does to simply write. But if all we ever do is revise until that old story we felt so passionately about is lost under this newer, maybe-better-maybe-not story, we won’t be moving anywhere. We will stagnate. We will be writers with thousands of unfinished manuscripts we never had the courage to stamp “finished” on.
I know writers who have been sitting on manuscripts for years, because they’re still revising. They’re afraid of letting a public see something that they think is imperfect. They’re afraid of good enough.
The thing is, most to the authors who actually make a living at this writing thing launch projects that are good enough. And most of the writers I know (including myself) look back at their earlier work and can point to every single thing they would change to make it better now. We are always growing an evolving and improving as writers, which means that what we produce today is much different than what we will produce five years from now.
[Tweet “We have to let our works of art go. We have to let them out into the world. They are good enough.”]
There is something fantastically beautiful about looking back at earlier works and marking the evolution of our lives as writers, how much we have grown and changed and (hopefully) improved over the years. We’ll never be able to do that if we’re hiding our half-finished manuscripts in a file cabinet or a secret drawer or in a buried box out back. We have to write “The End.”
Here’s how I like to think of it: The world is not served by our hidden manuscripts. But it can be served by our good enough manuscripts. I know it’s scary. Sending a book out into the world is one of the most vulnerable things we can do, because sometimes it isn’t received well, and we aren’t sure what we’ll do if it’s not. And sometimes people don’t even care, so it just sits on shelves and gathers dust and no one ever picks it up to see if what’s inside might resonate with their deepest places. And sometimes we can see every single part where we would have changed a word or a sentence or a plot line mere days after publication, proof that we probably weren’t ready for this and shouldn’t have done it in the first place, until we had fixed that one thing.
The truth is, we’re always going to find something that needs fixing in our manuscripts. I’ve launched three books into the world now, and I don’t even want to go back and read them, not yet, because I know that what I’ll find will make me want to take them off the market, and I can’t do that as a writer. I have to be moving forward. The only way I can move forward is to publish.
I have to be okay with good enough.
This need to produce perfect art will keep us from writing faster, and I believe that the faster we write, the closer we will find ourselves to our true “voice” and not someone else’s we’re imitating (which makes it harder to write, too). We’re not overthinking things when we’re writing fast. And the faster we write, the less likely it is that our internal editor will hijack all our progress. It’s a forward-motion cycle that can also turn into a downward spiral, if we let that perfection-demanding voice in.
It’s important to produce good art, but it’s not so important that we don’t let ourselves just get that crappy draft out. Revision is a magical process, when all the random words become better-aligned words, a collection of paragraphs and pass that look like it could really be SOMETHING. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make it pretty and finished. Sometimes it takes more work than we ever thought it would, because some stories are harder to tell than others. But the point is that even those stories that take a lot of work could demand a whole life of work, until we put a stopping point on what we’re doing.
If we’re overthinking, trying too hard to be perfect, all we’re really doing is killing the story. We’re trying too hard. Most of us intuitively know how stories work. Most of us know how to tell them in an effective way.
So we should trust ourselves to do it.
How to let go of the need to produce perfect art
1. Set yourself a deadline.
Sometimes it helps to know that the project has an ending date, that you must have all your writing done by the end of that deadline. I usually give myself a month or so to write the rough draft, depending on my projected word count. And then I give myself no more than three months to turn that rough into a final draft, because I know if I give myself more time than that, I’ll overthink it. My art isn’t that great when I’m overthinking.
Deadlines can work in many different ways. You can set an actual date—March 31, 2016, say. Or you can set a deadline like “no more than 30 days.” Whatever works for you.
2. Read a story critically.
Mary Karr, a memoirist, claims that what has helped her become a better writer is examining the writings of other memoirists. She keeps a reading journal where she copies passages and writes commentary about places she likes or techniques that were effective. When we train ourselves to start reading this way, we’ll also notice the places that stick out as don’t-like passages. The discipline of analyzing other people’s stories will help us more quickly analyze our own. Stories also help deepen the pool of story inspiration, giving us all kinds of resources to draw from.
3. Ban perfectionism.
I know it’s hard. I’m a closet perfectionist, and right before a book launch, I always hear the same voice telling me it’s not good enough. It’s not even good.
Perfectionism will drive us crazy. We have to loosen its grip on our throats, because it will not serve us in any way. It will only set up unrealistic expectations, and it will show us how to improve our work until the very end of time. We’ll never move forward if we’re constantly looking back.
4. Put down the red pen.
It sure is tempting to go back and look at a manuscript “one more time,” but if you find yourself sneaking back to them, give yourself a number of drafts. If it’s not fixed by this particular draft, then that’s it. That’s all you get. Limiting the number of tries we have helps us to just let it go.
5. Launch and move on.
Let your project do its work. Let it shine for a couple of days. And then get started on your next work, because it will most likely be better than the last.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
One of the most difficult parts of being a parent writer is getting started.
Our kids demand so much time. When they’re young, they require supervision at all times, and they need things constantly, and they demand attention at every turn. The only break in sight, hopefully, is nap time (not so if you have twins).
[Tweet “Kids are not an easy undertaking. Neither is a career when you have kids.”]
But the question we have to ask ourselves is this: What is the world losing if I am not pursing my writing dream?
And another, like it: What is my family losing if I do not pursue my writing dream?
I’ll tell you what the answer looked like for me. I was losing, daily, pieces of myself. I found myself stuck in a job I hated, because I was under-appreciated and, frankly, taken advantage of, because it didn’t pay squat and it demanded much more than it gave. Besides all that, all I really wanted to be doing was creating my own creative content and pursuing a career that involved poetry and novels and essays on my own platforms. But we had five kids at the time, and it was impossible to find time to pursue anything at all. I hadn’t written in four years, and I didn’t know if I still had it in me, all those stories that had waited once upon a time.
Something that should bring us comfort as parent writers is that no matter how long you’ve been out of writing, you don’t ever lose it. It’s true that practice makes you better, and if you’re working daily on your writing, you’re going to always get better at it. But when you step away from writing for a season—or four years of seasons, like I did—it doesn’t mean you’ve lost all your skill or creativity or stories. We can feel afraid that it might, but it’s a lie. We’ll be as good as we’ve ever been, and we’ll only get better with time.
One night, I told my husband that I needed to sit down and talk things out for a while. He’s a gracious man, so, of course, he agreed. I told him that I felt like I was shriveling up inside myself, like I was not doing what I was made to do. I was made to write. I was made to create. I was made to show the world what lived inside. I loved journalism—it’s probably what gave me the greatest insight into human nature and empathy, not to mention fostering discipline and the ability to make a deadline and keep it—but it was not exactly the dream I carried in my heart. I wanted to be an author. And so we carved out fifteen minutes a day when I could sit and write about whatever my heart wanted. I wrote about family values and, later, turned those early journals into books.
The point is, I had to start at fifteen minutes. I did not have the luxury of time that many writers have, where they could spend days on end simply writing to their hearts’ content. I had to carve out time, and it was not enough time, but it was a start. I was working. I was consistent. I was growing.
We all have to start somewhere. It could be five minutes of writing time, snuck in while the kids are sleeping. It could be fifteen minutes of time when the kids are having “Daddy time” and we’re locked in your room scribbling or typing as fast as we possibly can. It could be whole afternoons of putting fingers to keys and cranking out more words than we’ve ever seen in a whole year. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. Every minute is progress.
People ask me all the time how I got started as a parent writer. Usually this is based on the simple fact that I have six kids. It seems like an impossibility with one kid, let alone six. Mostly because writing expects a commitment, and how does anybody keep a commitment with kids? It’s not easy, but if we really want to get started, we’re going to have to do it. We’re going to have to mark that nap time as time we’re pursuing our passion instead of sleeping ourselves. We’re going to have to engage in a conversation with our spouse about a time that might work for both of us. We’re going to have to commit.
After the staring, it looks different for everyone. There’s no right way to do this writing thing. I start my mornings writing. Others end their days writing. It doesn’t really matter. We have to find what works for us and our family, and we have to do it consistently, over and over and over again. We’ll meet resistance, sure, and sometimes the baby will be sick and sometimes there are other commitments, but if we want to make this writing thing a career kind of thing, we’re going to have to first start. There will always be something else to do—laundry, dishes, playing out back, cooking. That’s not going to go away just because we decide to write. But we’re going to have to prioritize and ask for help and then we’re going to have to sit down and forget it all and create.
Some first steps for getting started as a parent writer:
Step 1: Have a conversation with your spouse.
One of the most important parts of a successful marriage is good communication. Spouses who find a safe place to talk to each other honestly and openly are spouses who will find even greater commitment and trust. Engage in a conversation with your spouse about the ways you’ve been feeling, what you want to do, who you want to be.
If you don’t have a spouse, have a conversation with your children. Tell them you want to start a career as a writer, and you’re going to need them to stay in their beds for at least fifteen minutes after they’re put to bed. If they need something after that, you’ll be able to deal with their needs. Let them know how important it is for you to pursue this dream. Tell them your stories. Invite them in.
Step 2: Get time scheduled on the calendar.
It’s not going to happen if it’s not scheduled. I’m a big proponent for writing everything down on a calendar. This will help, too, if or when the spouse forgets that you’ve agreed upon this particular time as your writing time. It’s there on the calendar. Make a sign for your bedroom door. Let your kids know it’s writing time.
Step 3: Resist resistance so the writing becomes a habit.
Don’t worry if you have trouble the first few times you try. It’s going to take a while to make this writing time a habit. You will meet all kinds of resistance—chores that actually beg you to do them, computer problems, a blank head space. Resistance will do all it can to keep you from creating. If you have trouble getting started, write about your day.
[Tweet “The simple habit of writing will virtually eliminate “writer’s block.””]
Step 4: Plan an editorial schedule.
Once you’ve gotten used to creating, planning an editorial schedule will help you make the best use of your time. I used to think this wasn’t allowing me to be “creative” enough, but I’ve learned in my years of writing that knowing what I’m going to write before I sit down to write it helps the subconscious roll that topic around in ways we can’t even explain. Planning a schedule reinforces your commitment and lets writing know you’re in it for the long haul.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Using time wisely is an important part of a writing career when it comes to being a parent writer who creates in all the margins. And it can seem almost impossible, because it’s hard to know what a day will hold in its hands until you’re actually there.
But it’s possible to use our time wisely.
We’ve talked about goal setting, and we’ve talked about making a daily schedule. Both of these will help us use our time more wisely, but there is one more step we must take before we will see the most efficient use of our time.
For me, that step looks like a hard-copy to-do list. I used to be a reporter, so I have all kinds of old reporter notebooks that I use to write down everything I need to do each day, in the order in which it should be done. For others this could look like a task app, where they can write down the steps that will get them to their goal.
It’s all well and good to make goals, but if we don’t separate the steps necessary to meet those goals, we’ll never reach them. It’s all well and good to make a schedule, but if we don’t know what to do with that schedule, we’re not going to use it the way it should be used.
So the next step in increasing our productivity is working backwards from our goals. What do we need to accomplish each month in order to reach our goals? What do we need to accomplish in each week? What do we need to accomplish each day?
I make a list of everything. I make a list of all the submissions I’ll make. I make a list of all the projects I want to work on. And then I assign each of those steps a particular day that makes sense.
Some people don’t like to divide out their days like this, because they think it’s too constrictive, but I would argue that if we don’t have our days scheduled with activities that will move us farther along toward our goals, then we’re not going to get anywhere. We’re just going to be spinning our wheels.
[Tweet “To-do lists might seem old-fashioned. But they keep me right on track to reach my goals.”]
When we wake in the morning without a plan for the day, we can feel aimless. We’ll most likely end up saying, “Well, I’ll just write on whatever today,” and then we’ll spend all our writing time trying to figure out what we “feel” like writing, and before we know it, we’ve wasted our 15 minutes on wondering and figuring instead of putting pen to paper. We have to first have the structure, the box of a day, to then deviate from that box if we so wish.
[Tweet “Using time wisely is more than just committing. It’s also about making the plan to facilitate it.”]
Every day, before I go about my day, I look at my to-do list. I don’t have it memorized, by any means. There are too many lines on it. I write everything: read this, write that, send an email here. I write my week’s daily to-do list on the Friday before, after a meeting with my husband about what might be happening that has the potential to change what I’m hoping to accomplish (it’s good to be prepared instead of blindsided, though, of course, we can’t be prepared for everything).
Using time wisely also means that we minimize the distractions. Those distractions can come from a variety of places. It can be our children bursting into our room when they think they want us and our sitter or partner didn’t catch them in time. It can be things like social media, where the pings of notifications will knock us out of flow. Some of my biggest distractions are when essays are picked up by Scary Mommy or Huff Post. I constantly check the shares to see how it’s doing and whether I have any comments. Using our time wisely means we are working to eliminate, or at least minimize, all the extraneous noise.
As parent writers, we don’t have as much time to work on our writing as our counterparts might, which means we have to be using our time wisely. We don’t have the luxury of messing around on the Internet for a little bit of the morning, because all our time is sacred and precious. We will learn to work better and more productively because of our time constraints, but for a while they can feel like impossible chains we need to break before we can bust out as a legitimate authors. If only we had more time. If only we had more freedom to play around a little. If only.
If only never gets us anywhere. Planning and minimizing distractions does.
How to use time wisely:
1. Know exactly what it is that you need to do when you sit down to do it.
Like I said, I keep a very detailed to-do list, and I schedule out all the tasks that need doing in my day. When I know exactly what I’m working on before I even sit down to work on it, I’m much more likely to get right to it, instead of caving to a distraction on the Internet.
2. Minimize distractions.
There are all kinds of apps out there that allow you to block the Internet and other distractions. Put your phone on do not disturb. Close out your browsers. Just sit down with your page and your story. Distracting ourselves can be a great way to procrastinate, but when we’re parent writers and don’t have a whole lot of time to work with in the first place, we’re not going to be able to afford procrastination. There is no I’ll-do-it-later for parent writers. It just doesn’t get done.
3. Re-evaluate goals.
When we set a goal to achieve, many times we’ll find that we’re much more likely to do the work necessary to achieve it if we’re constantly checking in with it. Don’t make goals and tuck them away until the end of the year. Bring them out periodically and see how you’re doing. Set your word counts by them. Schedule your projects on the calendar based on how much time you’d like to spend doing them. Evaluate.
4. Group like items together.
I’ve talked about this before. Keeping like items together helps us maximize the time we have. There is the business section of our writing career, which includes marketing and emails and submissions, and then there is the creative side of our writing career, and those aspects require different parts of our brain, for the most part (though everything about our business needs to be creative, too). It can feel jolting for a brain to go from writing a weekly newsletter to writing a fantasy series. If it’s possible to group like items together, we should try to do it. We’ll be able to get much more mileage out of our time. Look at your schedule as if it’s a giant puzzle, except with time, analyzing what might fit where, and then constantly experiment. If you notice you’re not logging as many words as you’d like to, see if something can be adjusted so that you are, in fact, writing enough words.
Using our time wisely is imperative as a parent writer. We will never be able to have the career we want to have if we don’t master the art of productivity. We must do this work.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
In the life of a parent writer, schedule is everything. You are taking care of your children and dealing with job responsibilities and taking care of the home responsibilities on the side. Where is the time to write?
And then, if your schedule opens up more, because you finally get to quit the day job and just work on your writing like you always dreamed, how do you ensure that you’re using your time wisely?
The secret is schedule.
My days are very well structured, from the morning to the evening. Our household runs on a tight schedule, because it leaves less room for other things, like 3-year-old twins tearing down the walls around us, and kids function better when there’s a predictable schedule in place. We know what time we’re going to eat and what time we’re going to have Silent Reading and what time we’re going to call for lights out. This makes some of us in the household (myself included) pretty dependent on this schedule and a little irritable when something unexpectedly knocks events out of whack (there are drawbacks to everything).
Our schedules can be more fluid, if that’s what works for us. But if we want to reach the goals we’ve set for ourselves, we’re going to have to carve out time in the schedule. Knowing when you’re going to work on what, whether today is a nonfiction or a fiction day (if you write both—and if you have a blog, you’re going to have to write both) gives our productivity a helpful boost. It’s beneficial to know when it’s time to create all that social media micro content and when it’s time to shift into an editing frame of mind. It helps to know when we’re going to work on that rough draft and when we’ll have the time to brainstorm some blog topics.
For my scheduling, I do a thing called batching. This means putting like things together. I write all my blogs for the week on one day. I write all my rough draft fiction on one day. I do all my editing on one day. I write finals on several days, but always together. I juggle several different projects at a time, shifting between fiction and nonfiction, producing content for a video show, creating all my social media content. I work much faster when I can knock it all out at once, instead of a little here and a little there.
I work hard on my schedule. I started the new year with a pretty rigorous one in place. When I realized I hadn’t built enough margin into that schedule, I adjusted.
[Tweet “Creating a writing schedule doesn’t mean we’re bound to it forever. It’s a framework.”]
A framework will make us more productive.
(Sound familiar? It’s the same with goals.)
My schedule happens in blocks of 90 minutes. I’ve found that I work best in 90-minute blocks, because I can focus for that 90 minutes, close out everything that will distract me, take a quick break and ease right into the next 90-minute block.
I schedule my blog posts, I schedule the topics I’m going to write about, I schedule which books I’ll be working on each week and their deadlines. I even schedule my reading.
Setting up a schedule helps our brain maximize the time it has. When we’re given only a small block of time to create, we don’t want to be wondering about what it is we’re going to create. That takes time. If those pieces are already in place, we can get right to work during the window where our kids are (hopefully) napping.
Creating a schedule isn’t rocket science, and it’s not something that will look the same from person to person. I spend time revising my schedule whenever it feels like it’s too aggressive or I’ve missed something somewhere. Some of it is trial and error, because I don’t know what it’s going to be like grouping two particular activities together, and if it doesn’t seem to work, I’ll revise the schedule, and then I’ll revise again, until I have it exactly right and I’m producing as much as I can with the time I have.
How to make your own schedule:
Step 1: Look at all the time you have.
Write out all the blocks of time you have. I try to work in 90-minute increments and then take a quick break for water, but not everybody has the kind of time I have to write. That’s okay. Write out the time you do have, and organize your time into blocks. Maybe it’s half an hour here or 45-minutes there or just 15 minutes somewhere else. Write them all down. Some of those small blocks we won’t be able to fill with work, of course, because maybe it’s the very time our kids come home from school and we always want to be available to greet them. But use all the blocks you have and write them all down.
Step 2: List everything you’d like to accomplish in a week.
This would be things like publishing blog posts or writing a particular number of words on a story you’re working on (consulting our goals will be helpful for this step.). It would also be things like writing and sending email newsletters and creating social media content for your business. All the tasks that you have in a week that are important for a writing business need to be listed out. The point of this is that sometimes our expectations don’t match our time. Writing everything out helps us prioritize when our time is short.
Step 3: Match what you’d like to accomplish with your blocks of time, as if you’re putting together a puzzle.
This is my favorite part. Sometimes we’ll end with a deficit of time. That means we have to take away some of the tasks until our time opens up a little. Sometimes we’ll end with a deficit of tasks, in which case we can either schedule more tasks for ourselves or we can do what every writer should be doing—read. Or we can choose to rest, which is just as powerful.
Step 4: Don’t be afraid to adjust the schedule.
Sure, it takes time to adjust, but we’re saving time in the long run, because we’ll have a detailed schedule that will help us be the most productive we can possibly be. It’s important that we understand that making a schedule (even if we do it in pen), doesn’t mean it’s an always-and-forever schedule. We can constantly adjust to accommodate what it is we’d really like to do in a week. We’re going to eventually finish that book. What then? Have a plan.
Sometimes life will demand more from us, and we’ll have to sacrifice a bit of work time. Sometimes our children will demand more from us. Sometimes our day job will demand more, and we’ll have to sit and create while our kids are participating in family movie night without us for a season, because someone’s waiting on revisions. Don’t be afraid to play around with the schedule and adjust to the seasons of life.
Having a schedule at all will positively affect your focus and your productivity. It’s one of the simplest things we can do to set our writing career in forward motion.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Writers have very sedentary jobs. When we’re not sitting down reading, we’re sitting down writing or editing a manuscript or working on pitch materials or compiling a book. If we wanted, we could sit here in the same place, forever.
But all that sitting isn’t good for a body.
I tend to be a pretty healthy person. I enjoy eating well and working out, and it’s easy for me to schedule that exercising time on my calendar every day. I walk my boys to school every morning. I do interval training. I eat mostly paleo, because my body has little ability to process carbs.
But the writing was a problem.
Last last year I found that sitting for four hours every day was really getting to me. I couldn’t figure out a way to do anything differently until I discovered the beauty of standing desks.
Standing desks allow a writer to stand for whatever period of time they’re writing or working on a computer. I don’t use my desk when I’m writing by hand, which is only during my morning journal time, because I write so much faster if I’m typing, but I use it any time I use my computer, which is five hours a day.
Now. Standing for five hours a day doesn’t sound possible when you haven’t been standing for an hour. So I have to tell you that I didn’t start out standing for five hours. I stood for an hour, and then I stood for two, and then three and then four and then, finally, five. And some days, when I wake up with a back ache because one of the kids landing his jump-off-the-couch wrong on my back, I don’t stand for the full five hours. The point is to stand for the majority of our writing time instead of remaining sedentary.
A change like this doesn’t have to be expensive. You just have to get creative. I don’t actually have a standing desk. I set up a makeshift one one my bedroom dresser. I stacked a few Writer’s Market books on top of each other, until the computer sat at a height that was comfortable, and called that my standing desk.
What I love about a standing desk is that when I’m stuck on a plot line or I can’t think of a word I need for this particular phrase, I just bounce on my toes a little, or I step back from the computer screen, and I figure things out that way. Sometimes I’ll accidentally look at myself in the mirror (which is a little startling. Do my eyes really look that crazy when I’m concentrating?), because, like I said, my standing desk is really a dresser stacked with books.
For writers, a standing desk will increase our word count, because there is a proven link between physical activities and the inner working of our brains. I’ve measured this phenomenon. I produce about 20 percent more words (especially the rough draft kind) when I’m standing.
Not only that, but a standing desk is beneficial to our health. While it may seem like standing for all that time couldn’t be exactly healthy for you, if you’re wearing the right shoes (I wear my bright pink running shoes with adequate arch support), and you’re moving around a little (I walk in place sometimes or dance to the music coming through my Pandora station), then you’re actually burning calories while you’re writing. How cool is that?
For a while, I had a bum knee, an old injury from high school volleyball that flared up with the weeks of rain Texas had. I had to take a few days off of standing and, instead, sit in my blue wing chair. I didn’t produce nearly as many words when I was sitting. And my brain felt all tied up, because there was no movement happening.
Standing while creating makes it happen faster, more easily, and also makes it better. I’ve seen this in my own practice.
A new year always results in people making resolutions to stay healthier, and sometimes, when we’re pressed for time like parent writers often are, it’s hard to find time to fit in something as “unnecessary” as exercise and healthy practices, but we will be better writers if we keep ourselves healthy. As we’re taking care of ourselves, we can better take care of our children, and then we can better take care of our work.
It’s at least worth a try.
Some ways to get healthier as a writer:
1. Set up your own standing desk.
It doesn’t have to be something you spend a whole lot of money on, but it does have to be something that doesn’t hurt your eyes and neck and back. My husband once set up a standing desk on a treadmill, using some old lumber, so he could walk while he was writing. This is all I needed for my standing desk:
(Picture)
2. Take half an hour every day to do something physical.
You could go for a walk or play a game of kickball with your kids (Someone once said that if you play like children, you won’t ever have to do another workout in your life. It’s true. My kids play hard.). You could do an actual workout. I practice interval training and weight lifting, mixed with some anaerobic and aerobic activity. I also walk my kids half a mile to their school. Sometimes I got out on a long run to clear my head.
One of the best way to get our brains working is to do a workout. The brain responds surprisingly when we get moving. Not only does exercise benefit our writing, but it also boosts our immune system. Fewer sick days off means more days writing.
3. Write on the go.
While you’re out for a walk, or even running (if you can manage—I never could do it well while running. Too many hills in this part of the country.), speak your words into your voice recorder. Turn them into essays or chapters. This will increase your word count considerably.
4. Drink water. Eat.
This may seem like a crazy one to put on a list like this, because how can we live without drinking water and eating, silly woman? But the truth is, sometimes I get so involved in my writing that I completely forgot to drink water and eat. My kids eat lunch pretty early, and I”m not usually hungry while they’re eating, and so then it gets to nap time and I get started with some of my writing, and before I know it, it’s time for dinner and I never even had lunch. Same with the water thing. I keep a Klean Kanteen next to me at all times. I try to drink three of them a day.
5. Read while on the run.
When I’m running or walking, I’ll listen to podcasts about the craft or I’ll read audio books. This is a great way to pass the time and let our subconscious minds gather what they need in order to write better. My husband also got a blu tooth speaker that is water proof, so we can listen to whatever we’d like in the shower, too. When we’re parent writers, we have to squeeze every single minute out of our lives. Reading and learning always make us better writers, which means that time is never wasted.
