Know when you work best (and try to write during those times)
When I’m deep into a project, I’m not an easy person to live with. I’m snippy, distracted, disheveled: you interrupt me at my writing desk, I will actually snarl. I have a spouse who also works at home and a young child, and although they’re willing to share space with my wild boar–ness sometimes, every day’s not cool.
After fits, starts, and therapy, I discovered that planning the work week around my energy levels is the only way that I can show up for all my roles. Mondays and Tuesdays I’m at my most energetic, so I reserve these days exclusively for my creative writing. The other days of the week, I eke out life stuff (email, freelance work, groceries, parenting, attempts at human kindness), and I feel calmer about that eking because of my hyperconcentrated work at the beginning of the week. You can’t write all day during a weekday if you have a nine-to-five, but you can learn to honor your energy patterns when you make a writing schedule. If you’re not a morning person, it’s unlikely that you are going to be able to sustain an existence in which you write before your day job. Likewise, if you have responsibilities that leave you exhausted in the evenings, maybe writing after midnight isn’t the best choice. To the extent that you can control for this, try to plan your writing time when you have energy to write.
In order to maximize the time they have for writing, the most successful of our brethren decide what they want to accomplish before they start to work. Writing goals often fall into the three following categories:
Quantity
People balk at the idea that a novel can be written in a month, but National Novel Writing Month (better known as NaNoWriMo) exists to prove the contrary. Participants set ambitious word-count goals per day in order to write the entirety of a novel draft during the month of November, and the website offers fun tools to track your progress and to connect with writing friends.
Although NaNoWriMo has created unnecessary stress for literary agents whose inboxes are flooded with half-baked manuscripts each December, it proves that you can make ambitious writing projects manageable by breaking them down into small parts. A ninety-thousand-word novel, for example, can be written over a year by writing three hundred fifty words on each day of the workweek (reward yourself for your productivity and take the weekend off!). For people who have a hard time visualizing word-count amounts, three hundred fifty words is roughly the length of the desperate, run-on email you just sent to your best friend. So to reach your writing goals, stop writing long emails, and work on your book instead.
Most writers who use the word-count method feel productive if they write one thousand words a day. Regardless of the number you pick, remember that hitting your word-count goal doesn’t perfect the project; revision does. So leave time to revise!
Butt-in-the-chair time
“I am for consistency,” says author Gina Sorell. “There have been times in my life I’ve been able to write for a few hours every day, and times when I can only write for a few hours on Saturday mornings. But I find that the consistency of the routine, whatever that may be, is key. Right now, five days a week, I’m at my desk by 5:30 a.m. for two hours, before family life and work life wake up. I’m not bragging about the time of day that I get up,” Gina adds. “I’m a terrible morning person, but dawn is the only time I can feel free of other responsibilities to write.”
You have to be a particular kind of person with a particular work schedule to maintain a daily writing habit. For writers whose day jobs already require that they think, edit, and write all day for the benefit of others, it can be virtually impossible to find the reserves during the week to write creatively for themselves. And, of course, for someone who is responsible for other people in their household (offspring, aging parents), maintaining a daily writing habit is a pipe dream that bursts open during cold and flu season.
Be wary of the people who say that you have to write every day to be a writer: they’re projecting their inadequacies onto you. Think every day about the things that you want to write, and when you have time to get to your desk, honor your intentions. You wouldn’t go grocery shopping during a dermatologist appointment: don’t organize your closet during your writing time.
If your current schedule makes it impossible to carve out windows of writing time each week, try the bingeing route. Pick one day somewhere in your schedule where everything can go to hell except your writing, and write the hell out of that day. The author Cheryl Strayed is a notable binger—in interviews, she’s admitted that she goes for months without writing a word only to “write like a motherf*cker” at artist residencies. An editor I know, who is also a writer, sets aside Saturdays to nest with her own projects: she’ll lock herself away and write for up to ten hours at a time.
Content goals
For the author Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, content goals are the only way she has been able to seesaw between her writing and other responsibilities (of which parenting is one). To make her writing time more effective, she works from an outline and concentrates on completing a certain number of beats. “I focus on plot points,” Miranda says. “Sometimes it’s a whole scene, sometimes there are three or four beats in a scene. Working this way means I can always feel like I’ve accomplished something even when I’ve only had fifteen minutes to write.”
I find content objectives gratifying, too. The first thing I do on my writing days is assess my energy and the amount of time I have to write, and then I give myself a content-related task: I’m going to write the sex scene today; I’m going to work through the father section in this essay; I’m going to get through my research on American-made automobiles in the 1930s for this thing I want to write. It’s easy to identify your manuscript’s trickiest parts: they’re the ones you’re not writing. Tackle those bits first. Start your week by writing those scenes terribly. At least they’re written! If they’re written, you can move on to making them better and more realistic, which is a far more nuanced and interesting job than getting words onto the page. If you do the hardest work first, the rest of the writing can feel like a reward.
Stay off of social media
Social media is the great enabler of procrastinators, so a lot of people protect their writing time by making the Internet difficult to surf. Some writers swear by web-blocking services such as Freedom; others write in cafés where they don’t know the Wi-Fi password; the truly desperate ask their roommates to change the Wi-Fi code in their apartment and to keep the code from them. During a short-lived steampunk phase, I used an old-timey hourglass to regulate my social media use: I couldn’t go online until the sand had transferred from one bulb to another. This was diverting until my cat—who has no respect for whimsy—knocked it to the floor.
These days, I use guilt and old-fashioned self-loathing to regulate my Internet use, and when that fails, I hide my computer and write longhand, which results in meditative, restorative, and completely illegible work.
Whatever your strategy is for getting words onto the page, don’t forget to give yourself a break from all the goal-making and the typing and the writing notes by hand. If you don’t hit your word count, if you take a phone call from a friend during your writing time, if you have a hangover and your soul needs you to watch reruns of Dynasty on your allotted writing day, you are still a writer and you’ll find another time to write.
Killing your inner perfectionist
For reasons we will not get into here, I once attended clown school. We had to do an exercise where we walked around the room