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
The last few weeks writing has felt really hard. I’ve been maintaining large word counts, but it hasn’t been easy. It’s felt like work. I find myself fidgeting and my mind wandering, and the focus just isn’t as sharp as I’d like it to be.
So I set up a standing desk in front of my dresser, with books stacked to make the computer sit at a proper height, and when I feel my mind wandering, I do a little sway or I stretch my muscles or I just bounce a little on my toes, because movement gets the brain working much more efficiently than sitting sedentary for four hours a day.
But still, even though my makeshift standing desk has been helping me write faster, it hasn’t made the writing feel any easier. I thought maybe it was because I was coming up on a much-needed Sabbatical, but then I realized it’s more than that.
Right now I’m working on four fiction projects. I’m writing one of them in first-person point of view, but I’m writing the others in third-person point of view. I’ve never written in third-person before, so this is something that feels really hard to me as a writer. I don’t like doing things that feel hard, and that’s why my focus has been everywhere all at once.
Maybe I would get more words written if I switched those three projects to third-person point of view, and maybe I would be saving time with those projects, but I also wouldn’t be growing as a writer. It doesn’t serve me and my craft to only remain where I’m comfortable. If I only wrote in first-person point of view for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be growing at all as a writer. I might be getting better at first-person, but I wouldn’t be a well rounded writer. And mostly I just want to be a well rounded writer.
So I forge on. Every week I write in that third-person point of view for each of those projects is another week I get better at it.
We don’t gain anything as writers by staying where we are comfortable, in that small little space of comfort where we feel we can be good. Maybe even the best. Sometimes we have to write something bad—really bad—to grow as a writer. Sure, I write mostly literary fiction, but I’m trying my hand at some young adult romance and a mystery romance thriller and some sci-fi and fantasy, because I’m not really sure which one I’d like to do best. I just know what comes easiest—literary fiction in first-person point of view.
Writing will always feel hard when we’re trying something new, whether it’s nonfiction or new fiction ventures. But what we can know when writing feels hard is that we are getting better, as long as we don’t give up. It’s like when our first-grade teacher asked us to do a description of a vase of flowers, and we said all the normal things that first time—the flowers are yellow and the vase is white and the water is clear. And then, as we grow and practice and continue to write, we begin to notice that the flowers aren’t just yellow, but they’re the color of our sister’s hair, and the vase isn’t just white, but it’s white with tiny veins cracking it, and the water isn’t so much clear as it is sparkly, because of those bubble breaths the stems take.
Description, when we were kids, felt hard. I know, because I have an 8-year-old who doesn’t always like doing these exercises when he’s in school, because it’s not all that fun to try to describe something when you can see it right in front of you and so can everybody else. But you keep at it because you want to get better. You want to turn a picture in your head into a picture in someone else’s head.
We keep on, because we want to improve as writers.
So when writing feels hard, here are some things you can do:
1. Remember that it won’t always feel this hard.
Things feel hard when we aren’t used to doing them. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean we’re bad writers. I let my hard time with writing third-person point of view make me feel like maybe I wasn’t quite as good as I thought, but it’s not true. If something feels hard it only means we’re learning and growing as writers. It won’t always feel this hard, because the more we practice, the better at it we will get. One of these days, it will feel so easy we’ll have to move on to something else.
2. Take a break from the project.
It doesn’t have to be a long break. Sometimes our projects just need a day or two to breathe. Sometimes it just needs a little space to develop. So put it aside for a couple of days or a week even. Whatever it takes to look on it with fresh eyes, because the truth about when writing feels hard is that we don’t really want to do what’s hard. We don’t get any better if we’re not constantly challenging ourselves with things we don’t really know how to do.
We can use the break to learn something new. I spend time outside of writing constantly seeking knowledge and information, like how to write mystery stories or how to craft a good romance or how to best write a long-form essay, because it serves my craft to always be learning. Short breaks can be good for getting us unstuck and making writing feel a little easier. But not too easy.
3. Maybe it’s time for a Sabbatical.
If you’ve never had a Sabbatical, maybe it’s time to try one. I can always feel when my Sabbatical week is coming up, because my exhaustion is overwhelming and my love for writing is not quite as thick as it used to be. Writing begins to feel really hard. I write an average of 40,000 words every week, and that can be grueling for a writer if there is no rest between. Taking just a week away where I’m not working on any of my projects or posting on any of my blogs is enough to help me start the following week with fresh perspective and renewed love and energy for what I am so privileged to do.
I take a Sabbatical every seventh week.
4. Stare fear in the face.
Many writers have a fear of trying something new. We’re not alone. But if we’re only letting that fear rule what kind of stories and essays we’re producing, those stories will start to sound canned. Formulaic. Unoriginal. We have to be willing to throw wrenches into our projects, and sometimes that means trying something new or introducing a completely different character or picking a different point of view that we’ve never written in or giving ourselves a word count constraint. Constraints can be good for us. So can facing our fear and doing what we fear anyway.
No matter what, don’t let that fear tell you what you can and can’t do. Prove it wrong. Do it anyway, and watch how you become so much better as a writer.
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
I can’t even tell you the struggles I’ve had the last few weeks. I’ve been cranking out enormous word counts, but they’re mostly rough drafts. I’ve been staying away from final drafts, because I just keep thinking, “I’m not doing this right. I’m not doing this right. They’ll all know I’m a fraud.”
If you’ve been a writer for long, you know that there are weeks like this. Sometimes there are whole months or years (God forbid) when the voices keep talking to us, stealing our courage. Your characters aren’t developed enough, they say. Your plot line sags in the middle, they say. Why in the world would you choose that point of view? they say.
Those internal editors can be a drag. I’ve gotten really good at ignoring them on the first drafts of my stories and essays, because all I’m really trying to do is get all my words down on a page without logical organization or readability per se. Sometimes I use abbreviations or the completely wrong word with an asterisk behind it because I’m just trying to get the words on the page, as fast as I can. When I need a new name for someone or I’m writing about a new place, I’ll often put a line where the name should be, because I don’t even stop long enough to figure out what I’d like to call it.
This works for me, because I’m getting words down on a page crazy fast. It’s why I can write 6,000 words in an hour and a half. It’s how I log an average of 40,000 words in a week of only 20 writing hours.
Not so for final drafts. Last week I blocked out three hours to begin writing the final drafts of episodes one and two of my Fairendale series. It took me a whole three hours to write about 3,000 words.
Part of it is because, up until now, I’ve written all my other novels in first person point of view. The Fairendale series is told by an omniscient narrator, which I have never actually done before. So I’m trying to get it right, and the entire time I’m trying to get it right, that pesky internal editor has been bothering me. “You’re not getting it right. They’re all going to hate this,” he says.
And I’ve believed him. I’ve wanted to quit writing the story altogether. And I would if there weren’t a lot of people (mostly my mom) who are really excited about this series and can’t wait to read it when I finally release it. That makes me want to finish it. It also makes me feel pressure to get it exactly right. I’m a perfectionist. I try to make everything 100 percent, even if people would be perfectly fine reading a story at 80 percent.
Internal editors can come to us at different stages in the process. Sometimes they come to us between the first and second drafts. Sometimes they come to us during the writing of our final draft, and we can’t seem to hear our gut over their shouting. Sometimes they come to us before we’re going to hit publish, and we can’t even do it. We just can’t.
Do you know what those voices really want us to do? They want us to give up. They want us to see that story written in a point of view that we’ve never tried before, in a genre we’ve never written before, and they want us to close it up and say it’s just too hard. They want us to forget that we can make mistakes.
That’s why, as writers, we have got to power through them. We have got to write anyway. We cannot let those voices dictate what we do next or how we write our story.
WE ARE WRITERS. WE CAN DO THIS.
Whatever “this” is.
We have the ability to challenge ourselves and grow and make mistakes and recover from those mistakes. No one who ever came to this business ever came to it perfect. As far as I know, no one has ever looked at their first books and said, “Wow. I was perfect then. What happened?” because just like we’re growing and learning as people every year of our lives, we are also growing and learning as writers.
So let’s get to it.
Here are some ways to beat the internal editors.
1. Try something new.
Write in a new genre. Write in a different point of view. Start a story from the middle and then figure out the beginning and end. Do whatever it takes to prove to those voices that you can do this and that you’re in it to stay. Right now I’m trying my hand at middle grade fantasy, middle grade science fiction and adult romance/thriller/mystery. I’ve never done any of these genres before (mostly because I typically write literary fiction in first person) and it is HARD. But trying something new is how we grow as writers.
2. Keep writing in that writer’s journal.
We talked about a writer’s journal last week. It’s important to see where we’ve come from and where we’ve been. A writer’s journal can help us make sense of our writing world and what kinds of things we need to do to eliminate the internal editors. Sometimes they come calling when we’re tired or burned out, and we just need a break. Sometimes they come because of fear. Sometimes they have a little grain of truth in them, and we need to learn something new along with trying something new. We can write about all of this in our writer’s journal, and when we feel them calling again, we can go back to the day they bothered us last time and know that we made it through that one; we’ll make it through this one, too.
3. Identify the voice of the internal editor.
Sometimes it’s an old teacher who didn’t really believe in us. Sometimes it’s a parent. Sometimes it’s just us. We have to know those voices.
I know that mine belongs to a creative writing professor from college, in his mid-to-late forties, with balding hair and a stubbly chin. He was the professor who didn’t like my writing in college, and I still hear his public criticism in my head sometimes. Sometimes I imagine a published manuscript in front of my old professor’s face, and me pointing at it saying, “Look what I did, Dr. Jerk.”
We have to know our voices to shut them up. So don’t be afraid to get to know that voice. They can only be damaging if we let them.
4. Take a short break.
Sometimes the internal editors come out because we’re putting too much pressure on ourselves (I was trying to make the final drafts perfect. That puts way too much pressure on a writer. Who decides when it’s perfect, after all?). Sometimes we just need to take a step back and give ourselves permission to fail and fail in an epic way. Failure is only another way to learn, so every time we fail, we get the opportunity to take that experience and turn it into something that benefits us by making us better.
Writing is a vulnerable pursuit. It takes courage to share and put ourselves out there like that. Internal editors can make us afraid, but they don’t have to have power over us if we don’t let them.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
A few weeks ago I took a Sabbath rest from my writing. I do this every seven weeks to give my brain and fingers and stories a rest, so I can come back fresh and ready, and I can protect against burnout.
Normally I use those “working” hours to learn something new or just read and relax or work on other arts and crafts that I don’t normally have time to do. But this Sabbath was the last one before my boys went back to school. So I decided to do something different. I decided to take an entire hour each day and just spend it with each of my boys, individually.
In a household as large as mine, I don’t often have the opportunity to hang out with my boys alone. So I wasn’t even sure what we would do, but I scheduled the time and let them know it was coming. I didn’t have to worry about making plans, because they already had their own plans.
The oldest was first. He wanted to do a puzzle for the first half hour, and then he wanted to write a picture book story together, where he would supply the picture and I would write a story for each page. It was a fun collaboration project that we both really enjoyed and are finishing up soon.
The second-oldest just wanted to do puzzles the whole time, so we talked about his upcoming year of school and how he’ll be in the first grade and whether he thinks he’ll have any of his friends in his class. The third-oldest wanted to do puzzles and read together, which was just fine by me, again. The 3-year-old twins didn’t make it a whole hour (more like 15 minutes), but they just wanted to talk—or ask questions about everything in the world until my eyes glazed over and I started answering, “I don’t know. I don’t know, baby.”
What I found during that time is that my boys became much more connected to me and much more compliant when they burst into the room later and I had to tell them that I was working hard to learn a new program or I was right in the middle of reading a book that I wanted to finish before the week was up, so they needed to shut the door on their way back out. They understood me better. I understood them better. We reestablished our connection.
What I found, coming back from that time of connection, is that my art was richer for the time we had spent together.
There is something about getting out of your normal routine, changing things up a bit, that can make you much more creative when you come back to the drawing board.
So many people nurse the fear that if they give up a whole week of writing, they will lose momentum on whatever project they’ve got going. I felt this way, too, in the beginning. Because I post a blog every Monday, and I was steadily growing an audience around that blog, wouldn’t I lose some of that audience if I had a Monday where a blog didn’t post?
But statistics (which I don’t always like to look at anyway) didn’t tell that story. In fact, my statistics continued to grow steadily.
And I felt much more energized as a writer for my week away from the keyboard.
When we are writers who work from home and don’t go into offices and only do this pursuit, it’s easy to slip into a more-than-full-time work pace, where we fill all the margins with work, because every moment is precious and needed. But working day in and day out, five days a week or seven days a week for the rest of our lives, with no rests in between, can lead us more surely into burnout than success.
If we’re parents, that means that our days are already filled with all the activity that children bring, and we don’t normally get a day off from that. We’re always on. Always on in our family, always on in our work, always on in our lives.
So rest time is doubly important for those who are doing it with children in tow.
Resting from our week makes us more able to do great work. Connecting with our children means we can more effectively connect with our art. We open greater depths in our hearts, which spills out into our work, when we are living life with our whole heart.
If it feels hard to find time for a Sabbath in your normal work load, here are some suggestions:
1. Begin by doubling up one week.
I did this at the beginning of my Sabbath practice. If I had anything that was regularly scheduled, I would double up on it the week before the Sabbath. In other words, the week before my Sabbath rest, I would write two blogs and four story installments and 12,000 words on that book instead of just 6,000. This won’t work indefinitely (and isn’t really the point), but for those just starting out, it can provide a sort of security blanket, because they’ve still produced the same amount of regular content. Just don’t try this for long.
2. Be okay with leaving something unfinished.
I’ve taken several Sabbath weeks this year. Before only one of them (the most recent one) was I able to finish a book’s rough draft in a nice and tidy spot. All the other times I left a book hanging right in the middle of it. This is a scary thing to do, because what if we don’t get back and finish it? What if there’s a noticeable snag in the draft that makes people wonder what exactly happened there?
These are all valid concerns. But they’re really unnecessary. Because, most of the time, what I’ve found is that when I come back from my Sabbath week, I’m that much more able to tackle that plot line again, sometimes with better ideas. That’s because leaving a story for a Sabbath rest doesn’t mean that story is out of our subconscious. Our subconscious often works things out without our even knowing, so giving it space can be good.
3. Use the week to learn something new.
Some people don’t like doing nothing. So learn something new. Spend the week learning about how to effectively market a book. Teach yourself how to sew. Pick up an old project from college and see if you can make it readable. There’s always so, so much to learn as authors, and exercising a Sabbath week doesn’t mean that we can’t still grow as writers and authors.
4. Hang out with the kids.
There’s so much inspirational creativity in our children. When we spend more time with them, some of that creativity becomes ours. We become better at what we do because of the time we take hanging out with our kids. It makes us better parents, and it makes us better writers.
And it’s so valuable to teach our children the beauty of rest. We live in such a rush-rush-rush world, and if we can model what it looks like to take a whole week off work and not worry about the money or what’s going to happen after this one week, they will learn Sabbath rest is something that’s not only possible but something that’s desirable.
5. But try not to write.
Now. I still wrote in my journal during my Sabbath, because it’s not a journal that will ever see the light of day. It’s just my unloading journal. So this wasn’t work, it was survival. I feel better when I’ve started my morning writing 800 words to get things off my chest. I could approach my Sabbath in the right frame of mind because of it.
Writing work should be put on hold for the whole seven days.
I hope you try it. I would love to hear how it goes.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
This is a really difficult season in my life. I have six kids 8 and younger (exact ages; 8, 6, 5, 3 (times two) and 7 months). That means a large portion of my time just goes toward the daily needs of my children—pouring milk, helping pack lunches, reminding them to pick up their clothes and pick out their next days’ clothes so we’re not late for school tomorrow, fixing meals, keeping the house in order, doing eight loads of laundry every week.
The list goes on and on and on.
So much of my time is spent on home and kids and husband that sometimes I grieve all that time I don’t get to spend writing (even though there’s plenty of it. Really.). I don’t get to live much in my head to work out plots or characterization or the best way to end an essay, because the time I have is writing time.
But something I have to keep reminding myself is that no season lasts forever. It will not always be this crazy, because there will be a day when all the boys will do their homework without a parent standing over them, making sure they focus. There will come a day when they will pack their own lunches without suggestions from their mama and daddy. They will take their own baths and clip their own fingernails and fold and put away their own clothes. They will solve their own problems.
Sometimes I think of that time, and I wish it here faster. Most days, though, I think of that time and I hope it stays far, far away, because there is something so special about my boys being little and knowing that I get to have them for this brief moment in time, this moment when they want to kiss me and hug me and talk to me, and I don’t ever want it to end.
So there is a rejoicing and a grieving that happens with every season’s change. We grieve that time will never turn back and yet we rejoice that time will never turn back.
Recently my 8-year-old decided to start taking showers in the mornings. He used to bathe at night, and I would sit in the bathroom with him and read a story, most recently R.L. Stine’s Goosbumps books. I grieved that I was losing that special time with him, and yet because he now does it all on his own, I have an extra 15 minutes every evening to help my other boys pick out their clothes for the next day and sign all the necessary school papers and ensure that everyone will be ready for school in the morning.
It’s not easy to remember, during the hardest seasons of our lives, that this season will not last forever. There are some seasons that don’t afford us much time for writing, and sometimes they can clamp our hearts and steal our joy, because we’re not able to live a dream in the way we think it should look, and it just feels like it will never end, all the demands and all the responsibilities and all the worry and frustration and work. It feels like that kind of season can last forever, because it’s not a fun place. But it will not last forever. No season ever does.
I got a great picture of this when I broke my foot (I fell down our stairs carrying laundry and broke my foot. It could have been much worse, the way I fell.). Sometimes, when the body is traumatized like that, it goes into a sort of depression. I fell into it hard, thinking that I would never be able to move around like I should be able to, that I would never be able to concentrate on my writing like I needed to because of the pain, that this funk would last forever.
Eight weeks later, I could walk without a foot cast. I could exercise again (with limits). I could sleep (mostly) without pain. And every week after it got better.
This season you’re in will not last forever. It’s important to remember for both the good and the bad seasons. They are seasons, and something different is already on its way.
What can make rough seasons less rough:
1. Focus only on what you can do.
When we start looking around at others’ circumstances and how they have this much time to produce that many words in a week, we are in danger of wondering why we can’t do that, too. We are different people. We have different circumstances. Some of us can produce 30,000 words in a week. Some of us are hard-pressed to crank out 5,000 words in a week. We’re all working, and that’s what matters.
Make your own schedule, for this season right now, and know that it will remain flexible, because tomorrow or next month or next year could be completely different. We must remain flexible as parent writers, always flowing with the seasons.
2. Figure out where you might be able to delegate some tasks.
We’re not made to do everything. That’s not a life in balance. If we are putting too much on our plates, we will never be able to do any of it well. That means that if I don’t have room on my plate to clean my house, I should either delegate it to someone else (a housekeeper) or be okay with letting it slide for a time. If I don’t have time to be a room mom at my kids’ elementary classroom, then I don’t have to volunteer to do it. We have to be willing to give ourselves the freedom to say no to things that may sound good on the surface but are really just crowding our plate more. We must learn the art of saying “no” or “not now.”
In the words of Jen Hatmaker: “We need to quit trying to be awesome and instead be wise.”
3. Take the pressure off this season.
The world can make us feel like we’re not doing enough, ever, but we just need to take that pressure off. Sometimes we can think we need to do just as much today as we might possibly be able to do in five years, when all the kids are in middle school. But the truth is, this time when they’re in elementary school or not in school at all, requires all hands on deck, and that means time is always short, but it doesn’t mean time will always be short forever (unless your kids play every sport imaginable). I have to let go of the pressure to produce in manic volumes that might be more possible when kids are older and I have more time to work.
Oftentimes seasons can come with their own pressure, but if we can take that pressure off, we open ourselves to the freedom of living in that particular season. We open ourselves to the joy of the season, no matter how difficult it may be. We open ourselves to flexibility and hope. We open ourselves to living with no regrets.
