Don’t “Find” Time, Make the Time

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A Guest Post by Wayland Smith

I was asked to write about finding a balance between work, life, and writing. Instead of talking about my writing credits, I’m going to run down my weekend as a way of showing what I know about the struggle to find time to write. It’s something I understand.

My regular shift is a long, overnight one. Thursday I went in to work with my shift starting at 6 PM. I was supposed to get off work at 6:30 AM, but there were some issues and our usual shortage of staff, and I ended up being released at about 12:30 in the afternoon. By the time I got home, I had been up for 24 hours. I had the rest of Friday and Saturday off, then worked a different job Sunday from 4 in the morning until 9 at night with one break in that stretch. With all that, I still got a few thousand words done over the weekend, and finished a chapter of one of my current works in progress. That’s not, “Hey, I’m cool,” that’s me showing that it doesn’t matter how busy you are, you can write if you chose to.

I hear people asking all the time, “When do you find time to write?” The answer is a simple one, but it’s one a lot of people don’t like. You fight for it. You make a commitment to yourself and you stick with it. Some people write every day, some have a word count per week, or month. It doesn’t really matter what you set for yourself. What matters it that you DO it.

Sometimes that means you don’t get to watch the game with your friends. Sometimes you don’t get to the movie you wanted to see. But, as I’ve heard many other people who are much more successful than I am so far say (and this may be part of why they are successful): Writing is a job. If you’re at all serious about it, you have to approach it like that. Jim Butcher has said, “I don’t have a muse, I have a mortgage.” That’s the attitude you need to get the words down.

So how do you find the balance? Well, that’s something you have to think about carefully. I believe the usually accepted statistic is that something like ten percent of writers manage to actually make a living off their writing. The rest of us have jobs in addition to writing. And, if you’re fond of eating, not living in a relative’s basement, and occasionally going out (or to cons), you need to keep the job.

Family is important, whether it’s a traditional tied by marriage and blood kind, or people who have become your family over time. You need these people in your life. If you don’t have them, you’re not well balanced, and that comes out in your writing, which suffers.

You need to manage your time, and you need to do it carefully. It’s going to be full of compromises. Occasionally, you’re going to have to go to work when you’d really rather be chasing the latest story idea. Sometimes, you’re going to have to tell your nearest and dearest and that you have a deadline coming up and you need some uninterrupted writing time. And sometimes, the voices in your head, or your imaginary friends, or however you like to think of it, are going to have to take a back seat so you can spend some time with the people you love. Or at least like.

You need to manage to be nice about it, but really firm. If you’ve promised time to your family, don’t slip out and start writing. If you have a goal that’s important to you and you need to put in a big push to get there, turn off your phone, shut off your internet connection, and write. It’s both the simplest and the hardest thing about writing. Writers write. Not talk about writing, not say, “I really should get some words down.” They write. And then write more. And revise and edit and rewrite. And while they’re doing all that, they have to keep a job and relationships with the people who are important to them.

All that said, I can offer a few suggestions about making some time. Note, making, not finding. You’re not going to suddenly trip over an extra hour somewhere. If you do, let me know how that happened. A few standbys that a lot of people I know use are either getting up half an hour earlier and/or writing during your lunch hour. If you bring your lunch to work, then A) it’s generally cheaper and B) the time you spent going somewhere, waiting in line, buying something, and then finding a table to eat it is time you can write. Yes, this requires some planning and dedication. So does writing. Remember those bits about it’s a job and making the time?

If your writing is really important to you, if you’re going to pursue a full time writing career no matter what, find a job that lets you write. I’ve heard Brandon Sanderson say he got a job as the night desk man at a hotel for just that reason. Night time security guard works, too. Yes, those are really radical changes to make to your life to get time to write. But then you’re back to the balance issue again. What are you willing to give up to move forward with your writing?

I’m not trying to scare anyone, or paint a picture of doom and gloom. I have a full time job, and work a few part time ones, and have a decent social life. I also managed to write just shy of 500,000 words last year. It can be done. You just to plan your time carefully. It’s worth it to me. Whether it is to you or not is something only you can decide.

 

Wayland Smith:

WAYLAND SMITH is the pen name for a native Texan who has lived in Massachusetts, New York, Washington DC, and presently makes his home in Virginia. His rather unlikely list of jobs includes private investigator, comic book shop owner, ring crew for a circus (then he ran away from the circus and joined home), deputy sheriff, writer, and freelance stagehand. Wayland has one novel out so far, In My Brother’s Name, and short stories in the anthologies “This Mutant Life: Bad Company”, “HeroNet Files, Vol 1,” “SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror,” and “Legends of the Dragon,” among others. A black belt in shao lin kung fu, he is also a fan of comic books, reading, writing, and various computer games (I’ll shut Civ down in one more turn. Really). He lives with a beautiful woman who was crazy enough to marry him, and the spirits of a few wonderful dogs that have passed on.

Writing is Life

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A Guest Post from Scott Lee

I pulled in to the house, just back from my third time attending the Superstars Writing Seminar. I had spent the ride home rehearsing the arguments I would present to my wife as to why I should pull out the credit card and immediately pay for Superstars 2017. After all, the price was the lowest it would ever be, it was set to go up in the morning, and we had a rough idea that our tax return was going to be pretty sweet… Argument in the bag, right? In. The. Bag.

Then I noticed that our little car wasn’t in the drive way. Huh. Becca wasn’t home. Perhaps I would end up waiting awhile before delivering my winning Superstars argument. Or then again, Becca wasn’t home…but no, I’ve lived enough to recognize that thought as a trap.

So, I walk into the house, playing it cool, calm and confident. I had an argument to make.

***

So here I am. Blogging. About writing. And life. And balance. Feeling that I owe you, dear reader, some modicum of advice, insight or wisdom. So here goes.

As I’ve thought about this over the past few weeks I knew pretty quickly that the story I started the blog out with—I’ll finish it later, don’t worry—would have to be included somehow. It is too ironic not to be, and it embodies what thoughts I’ve managed to gather.

First off, I find that framing the question as finding balance between life and writing, writing and real life, or between art and life—creates a false dichotomy. When I considered opening with this point, I had to ask myself if I wasn’t nitpicking. Was I just giving way to personal prejudice against any dichotomy? Everyone talks about writing this way. But I don’t think I’m just picking nits. We can talk about balancing priorities in life, we can talk about where writing fits in our lives, but as long as we split life from writing, even subconsciously, we’re self-sabotaging.

My job doesn’t define me. I am a teacher, but it’s a single facet of who I am not the sum of my identity. Even so, I don’t separate my role as a teacher from my life. It’s not something I go and do when I’m not living. And my role as a writer is no different. If you allow yourself to separate your writing from your “life,” then you make any pursuit of writing time, let alone balance, much harder.

Furthermore, in my experience, most writers are likely to experience things in exactly the opposite direction. It is writing that feels most like life. If we adopt a mental stance where we’re saying that isn’t true, suddenly we’re trying to find time for and balance with, a triviality. Good luck with that.

Second, in practical experience I’ve most often found “balance” by being a binge writer. My typical day didn’t include writing at all. And then when the muse struck in the form of some deadline, I became a zombie with an IV drip of caffeine who taught school and was hubby/daddy during the hours in a day that a sane person was awake, and, during the late night and early morning hours, I wrote like mad in order to get the paper done while the house was quiet. I wrote my grad school papers, my published short story, and my published short story collection/thesis, in this fashion. By the way, 16-19 hours of work/family followed by 5-8 hours of writing, is not balance, it’s insanity. But when I had to, I got writing done, and that seemed like enough. Not an approach I recommend.

I began to make headway a few years ago, when we went on our 10th anniversary vacation. We picked a destination vacation rather than a running-around-seeing-things vacation, and our schedule was determined almost entirely by my writing. I got up in the morning a bit before Becca and wrote my morning pages—three pages, long hand—a daily journaling/meditation exercise I encountered through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way books. Then, later, we made our way down to the public library where I’d get a guest pass and a computer and write while Rebecca patiently read whatever caught her eye. I never wrote for more than an hour and a half in a sitting, and most days I wrote for just at an hour, if not a little less. In those five days I wrote well over 10,000 words of new fiction. Not the most I’d ever put together over five days, but I did it without a deadline, without having to try to kill myself in the process, and without suddenly achieving the miraculous hours and hours of writing time I had been subconsciously waiting for before I could “get serious.”

The point isn’t go take a long vacation to Telluride, Colorado without any kids, it’s that in less than two hours-a-day, I put out one of the best steady chunks of words I ever had, and at the end of the process I was neither dead, high on caffeine, delirious, nor stressed out of my mind. I did it as a small part of my ordinary life.

When I got home I had to admit to myself—for the first time, although it seems painfully obvious in retrospect—that I could in fact find balance. Make time to write without killing myself. And I started doing so.

I would love to tell you that I immediately became incredibly disciplined and dove into writing what is now my bestselling novel an hour or less at a time over the next few months. That’s not what happened. My life wasn’t transformed. Nor was my writing. But I wrote more than I ever had, with greater regularity, greater ease, and less stress. And I produced more than I’d ever produced on any single project before.

So here’s my two tiny bits of wisdom: (1) You don’t need a ton of time. Just because Kerouac supposedly wrote On the Road as a highly caffeinated high speed physical endurance test doesn’t mean you have to somehow trade life for writing time. You don’t. Make writing time a part of your life. Make it routine, work-a-day, consistent. Don’t bargain for hours, days, weeks, months, or a year’s sabbatical with your work or your family. Bargain with yourself for an hour or so at a shot, or when you get really smart for any tiny snatch of free time. Make writing life. And you will discover more time and more peace than seems possible if you haven’t done it yet.

(2) Writing isn’t separate from life. In Neil Gaiman’s excellent “Make Good Art” commencement speech, he suggests that the response to negative experiences in life ought to be make good art. I often hear people simplify this to “When life happens to you, make good art!” I know what they mean, but it makes me sad. Because it’s wrong. Art isn’t the counter to life. It’s the ultimate expression of life, and its beauty, tragedy, and value. Art—or writing—isn’t just a record of life, it is the most positive and life affirming of human of acts—the act of creation. So don’t pit your writing against your life. Because the minute you pit anything against your life instead of embracing it as part of your life and making it essential, it will lose. Every. Single. Time.

Now I promised you the rest of the story…

***

My wife was waiting for me back in our room. I felt something coming, kind of the way the lady tied to the tracks in a classic melodrama must feel something coming.

“Hi Becca,” I said. “What happened to the car?”

“Well,” she said, “about that. I was driving on the other side of town today and every warning light on the dashboard came on at once. So I took it to the Toyota dealer. They say the transmission is shot. It’s going to be $5000 dollars to replace it.”

I asked about Superstars 2017 anyway. Why? Because writing is part of my life. An essential part. My wife knows and supports this. We talked about it. I didn’t apologize for asking, and she didn’t yell at me for being stupid, selfish or ridiculous or impractical.

I haven’t paid for Superstars 2017…yet. And I won’t for a while. Seems we need that big tax return elsewhere. I didn’t insist on paying for Superstars immediately, or get down about not being able to. Instead, we made plans for exactly how to pay for it later.

I’ll pay for my car now, because that’s part of my life, and I invest in it. I’ll go to Superstars next year, because writing is part of my life, and I invest in it. In the mean time I’ve had a few hours here and there, and I’m about finished with draft one of a new short story. I’ve loved writing it. I haven’t had a lot of time, but I’m getting it done, and every minute so far has been pure pleasure.

 

Scott Lee:

Scott Lee is a strange individual who chose teaching and writing as his two primary careers. Obviously he has no desire to make any money, and on that count has largely succeeded. He has, however, written much poetry, some individual short stories, published a short story collection entitled Singular Visions, directed 15 plays, and fathered several human children to go along with his less material offspring. He has thoroughly succeeded, in his own humble opinion, at living a worthy and interesting life.

Chasing a Dream and the Temptation to Work Yourself to Death

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A day doesn’t go by when one of my writer friends proudly proclaims online, “It’s 3am, I should sleep but I just need to finish this scene. I’ll rest when I’m dead.” It’s almost like a badge of honor for writers to show others how late into the night they work, sacrificing sleep, personal time, and free time. When I started focusing my life and career toward writing, these were the posts that I thought I needed to live up to. They were inspirational. Sacrifice all for your dream. Go, go, go, until there’s nothing left.

Now, whenever a post pops up on my feed about another writer pushing themselves to the limit, I keep scrolling. Because that kind of behavior takes me back to a nightmare time in my life when I worked in that job.

Most of us have had that job. The job where you worked long, thankless hours. Where high stress was your every day norm. The boss you hated, breathing down your neck. The one where each day felt like you lost years of your life. The one where you reached burn out after only a couple of weeks.

I come baring good news: writing is not that job.

Don’t make it that job.

In a short, fantastic read over on Medium.com by Jessica Seeman, Jessica points out that working hard felt like a non-negotiable. “Working hard is ignorance. Because I was young, and my narcissistic boss told me it is the only way.” But working that hard takes energy away from other activities necessary for your health. “Working hard is selfish. For I am robbing my family and friends from my presence, love and attention.”

When I was working for small businesses and startups, it seemed like not taking a break was held in high regard. But science tells us taking breaks not only makes you more productive, it also makes your work better. When you’re busy and have deadlines, it feels counterintuitive to take a break. But taking those breaks helps you stay focused on the task at hand, helps your brain take in information and make connections, and helps us reevaluate what’s important. 

Doing the best you can in the time allotted is good enough.  There is no need to hyperextend or overexert yourself. The work will be there for you to do, no matter what state you put yourself in to do it.

Don’t get me wrong. You will have deadlines. And some of those deadlines will be tight, and you will have to occasionally give up some free time. But if you allow your free time to be taken over time and time again, then that’s exactly what will happen until you decide to stop it, or until burnout stops you.

 

Writers Are People Too!

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Have you ever noticed how we tend to speak of our time as if it were a commodity? Just look at the verbs we use! We spend time, we save time, and we waste time. At work, we earn time off and are paid in terms of tender per hour or per year. Ultimately, whenever you go work for another you are leasing them your time and attention, devoting your talents to their projects rather than your own. As the cliché goes, time is money.

So, if we count and budget money, why shouldn’t we do the same for our time? As an example, let’s consider my time in round numbers. There are 168 hours in a week. I find my job to be challenging and fulfilling, and so I spend, on average, 45 of those hours working. It takes me another 4 hours a week to commute back and forth, and I usually aim for about 7 hours of sleep a night. All that accounts for 98 hours per week and leaves me with 70 hours to do with as I please.

Sure, once you start considering the minutiae of everyday life, that time goes fast. However, just because I feel that I “need” to do a thing doesn’t change the fact that I’m expressing value by doing it. I clean my cat’s litter boxes because I value their companionship as much as I appreciate having a house that doesn’t smell like cat poop. I value my personal appearance and hygiene, as well as the health benefits that come from regular exercise and eating well. I want to be free from debt, live in clean spaces, and maintain my relationships with my friends and family. It seems like a lot to do in 70 hours, and it is.

However, in and amongst all those details I cannot allow myself to forget that I also value writing. Fiction is a demanding mistress. Like many other authors, I’ve spent years practicing my craft and actively working to maintain and improve my abilities. I’ve devoted countless hours to planning, writing, and editing stories. I’ve invested all of this time because I love the act of creation. I find joy in building worlds and characters, satisfaction in a well-crafted phrase, and a sense of profound peace in the ability to control a world absolutely. Writing fulfills a deep emotional need and so it is worthy of my time.

The major difference between a professional and a hobbyist writer is their commitment. The hobbyist writes when it is convenient. When they find time. The professional chooses to carve time out of a busy life to write. The hobbyist makes excuses for why they didn’t have the time, and the professional acknowledges the reasons and makes it work anyways. This is why I leave a notecard that reads “70 Hours” taped to my bathroom mirror. My time isn’t infinite, but it is mine to do with as I please.

There are many things in this world that seem really important, genuinely urgent, and make a great case for why I need to spend my time working on them rather than having my butt in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard. And while some of them do need to be taken care of now, most can be managed to still allow room for writing time. The past is done and that time has already been spent, but I can choose my actions going forward.

Knowing and saying all this is one thing, but living the commitment to be a professional is often much harder. I’m as guilty as anyone else when it comes to making excuses. In fact, one of my friends recently called me out on this, something that I love her dearly for doing. We all need writer friends to help keep each other honest.

I can’t tell you how to strike a work-life-writing balance that’ll work for you. As far as I’ve been able to find, there’s no magic formula. However, if you got it figured out be sure to share your solution. The best I can do for you is talk about what has worked for me in the past, and more importantly the traps that have bogged me down. But don’t just take my word on it.

This month on the Fictorians, you’ll hear from a truly inspiring roster of writers who all need to balance the many demands of life against their writing time. Though they each go about maintaining their work-life-writing balance in different ways, I’m sure that you’ll find some stories and advice that resonates with your own situation. Whether you feel that you just need to make a few tweaks or perform a complete overhaul of your work-life-writing balance, know that you are not alone. Balancing the many demands of life is something that we all struggle with. Be welcome and happy writing!