If you're writing AS a full-time job—or if you want to be—it probably takes you full-time-job amounts of time to get the writing done that you need to. One of the strangest misconceptions writers seem to labor under about making money writing (one that I am constantly calling out here) is that one can make Full Time Salary™ with Weekend Warrior™ effort. You can get published. You can finish your book. You can PUBLISH your book. You can get paid—maybe even enough to pay a bill every month with the fruits of your wordsmithery labor. But you won't be taking summers in the French Riviera if you don't work hard and almost every day. If you're a household name, you might be able to rest on your laurels for a few years making asynchronous income, but I fucking PROMISE you that you also didn't get to be a household name by working ten hours a week.
And let me tell you, when you're not writing full-time, other stuff seeps in. (And, of course, though I tell this as a cautionary tale and for the sake of transparency in my process, I should point out that by "you," I mean ME….but I probably also mean you, so be careful.) I never stopped writing every day (another drum I bang all the time), but boy did I drop off of trying to get posts up and sit down for ten to twelve hours and edit and do all the hard work of the space in between writing for pleasure and publication. I just made sure I was keeping the habit so that the tools of process (and maybe a few tools of craft) would still be waiting for me when I came back.
Most are.
A few are stiff and rusty.
A couple I'm going to have to start over on.
It could be worse. And if I hadn't written every day, it WOULD be worse. And if I'd written more, it would be better, but that's where your own life balance and priorities come in. I wasn't willing to tell someone I loved (going through the worst thing they'd ever been through in their life) that they needed to find someone else to talk to about it. Maybe you make different choices.
Now…..I am all too well aware that I have been writing a long line of "Here's what went wrong in the LAST few months…" posts spanning all the way back to 2021. Miscarriages. Cancer. Terrible breakups. Liver disease. Death of boss-friends. Evictions. Debilitating chronic pain. Multiple surgeries and recovery—both me and Rhapsody. Tons of pain and anxiety. I don't want to bore you with another post like that. In the words of Mrs. Landingham: "So you're having a little bit of a decade."
And it wasn't all bad. In there I fell in love a couple of times and took some trips and got to pivot completely on my career by going back to school for a year to get a certificate.
But in that time of writing much much less, other stuff oozed into all the cracks…and not in the fun way.
It wasn't like I ever said, "Hey, I'm going to do this other thinginstead of getting back to writing."
[Okay, actually, that's not true. There was that year of community college where I very deliberately said, "I don't want to take three years to become a certified personal trainer, so I'm going to do this all in one year even if it eats up some my writing time—which holy hells did it ever.]
But other than that very minor incident—hardly worth mentioning really—with the nine months off, I didn't ever deliberately sacrifice my writing time to other things. It wasn't like I was making a choice. It just sort of happened. I took on minor things in the cracks and crannies, since I was doing a lot less writing anyway. A commitment here. A diversion there. A weekly hike. A daily run. "Yeah, I can take the kids to school every morning." "Sure, I can help out with that." A sense of how much I could put on my plate that wasn't based on needing hours a day to write.
One more thing.
One more thing.
One more thing.
Mostly I was sick or in support mode…or sometimes both. Hospitalized. Doing chores. Running errands. Helping process grief or chronic pain. And it wasn't all bad either—sometimes I watched Daredevil because Rhapsody was tired of Love Is Blind and we were both home. Stuff just kind of dribbled into my schedule and once it got in there, it became VERY hard to get it back out. In the last year, I repeatedly noticed that on days where I wanted to write—where I was really excited about it—but there just wasn't time. I was running from thing to thing to thing and then my day would end. And every week I said "Okay, I'm going to be better on the weekend when I have time." And every weekend I would run ragged after the kids and say, "Okay, I'm going to be better during the week when the kids are gone and I have a routine."
Months of this.
And loved ones…. Loved ones. Oh dear sweet loved ones. They ARE loved—and they love you, I promise—but they can smell free time like a shark with a drop of blood. And if you're not wrapping your arms around that time, declaring it writing time instead of "free" time, and growling at them when they get close, like Rocco when you reach towards his bowl for that bacon the kids slipped him…you're going to have that precious time taken away by the most well-intentioned, well-meaning, deeply-loving, sincere people in your lives who just don't understand why it is that you can't do this ONE thing for them during all that "free" time you have.
Suddenly, I'm ready to write and champing at the bit to write and humping the WALLS to write, and my schedule is saying, "When, Chris? When would this writing happen?"
I'm a writer. I write. I have to write. If I don't write, it feels like a part of me is broken. So finding the time I'd lost to so many other things was the highest priority of February, and I wouldn't rest until I figured it out. I know a lot of people talk about writing in these terms, but when you take a look at their actual lives, they don't get much writing done. And I was about to be one of those people, speaking in florid, purple prose about how much I loved writing while doing little of it.
And so I took to my schedule. Every reclaimed hour its own battle of wills and Tetris'ed logistics.
I'm not going to tell you what matters in your own life or what might be more important than writing in a moment or in a week or in a month or in a year. That's for you to decide. I've heard people tell me there's no time to write when they play 8 hours of video games a day, and they're clearly kidding themselves, and I've seen people keep at it every day but the scheduled date of their own abdominal surgery and they're clearly more dedicated than me. Most everything else is in the liminal space between those two extremes, and I'm not here to judge what makes a "real" writer. Real is someone who writes.
What I can tell you is that if you're not writing daily—or very very close to it—you probably won't be able to quit your day job. And that on a long enough timeline, your priorities WILL become self-evident.
If you write roughly a page a day for 20 years—which is a reasonable pace for well revised and edited work—and take a year off to help a loved one through cancer, your body of work will be 6935 pages instead of 7200.
If, on the other hand, you let paycheck-earning work, family, and leisure time take precedence (and I'm not saying you shouldn't—we all live life according to our values and priorities), and only manage to come to the page six or seven weekends a year, and write the same page every day, then your body of work in the same 20 years will be only 240 pages.
At the beginning of February, I hit a crisis point. There just wasn't enough time for all of it and I HAD to write. I tried to add writing and four units into my already-busy schedule and the whole thing collapsed like a lung in a medical drama. And I had to have my Coming to Jesus The Morrigan moment.
OKAY SO WHAT WERE THE ACTUAL CHOICES???
On to part 2
No comments:
Post a Comment