Managing Your Time as a Writer

Do you hear that? Yes. It's the sound of the children making their way back to school after a long, lazy summer. Many parents breathe a sigh of relief while us teachers prepare to batten down the hatches and start a brand new year.

I love what I do, but I'm always sad about the end of summer. My prime writing time happens during those two and a half months where I'm not thinking about my students or their creative development. Instead, I'm focused on mine.

Managing your writing time no matter what career you are in is tough. Most of us don't have the luxury of sitting at home all day and escaping to another place with our imagination. The bills aren't going to pay themselves. So what's a working writer to do? After all, we're supposed to be networking, Tweeting, Facebooking, maintaining our websites, Pinteresting, and making ourselves available to readers--and writing! How do you do that on top of a full time job?

It ain't easy!

Everybody has their own method, of course. For me, I schedule my daily writing time for early in the morning. I put in about an hour before I have to start thinking about breakfast and getting the kiddo up. At night, I usually spend another hour editing. Weekends are my big days to push hard. I close the door which signals to the rest of my family: Don't bother her or she'll freakin' kill you. I also use those days to schedule tweets or to schedule my blog posts.

Yes, there are times when I lapse from my schedule. Honestly, as much as I love blogging and connecting with readers, I really need my writing time even more. So sometimes my blog posts may suffer, but I think the writing, getting the words down, is the most important thing.

So to those of you in the same predicament as me, good luck to you! Hang in there!

You can follow Mary Ann Loesch at www.maryannloesch.com or find her on Twitter: @maryannloesch!

Relax Into Your Writing--then Raise the Bar by Katharine Thorpe

“I think I can write a nice sentence, and a nice paragraph, and a nice chapter, etc. [but] I am also afflicted with perfectionism. […] I become aware that a sentence or chapter is not rolling along as well as ever it possibly could, and that awareness sort of rears up and blocks out everything else.”

            --Laini Taylor, YA novelist

“I dictate my first draft into a tape recorder. Then I transcribe it and edit the copy. When I’m dictating, I do it as if I’m speaking to a very bright college student. I envy people who write easily. I enjoy the process, but it’s not easeful for me.”  

            --Charles Krauthammer, nationally syndicated news columnist

“I'm always pretending that I'm sitting across from somebody. I'm telling them a story, and I don't want them to get up until it's finished.”

            --James Patterson, novelist

“Write in your own voice. Write as if you're talking to your sister. Unless you don't get along with your sister. Or don't have a sister.”

            --Ree Drummond, blogger, cookbook author, and children's book author

What happens when you sit down to write?

I'm not a very accomplished writer, but I've done a good bit of writing, reading about writing, and editing both my own and other people's writing-- and through all of it, I've come to one conclusion. Most writers fall into one of two categories: a), the ones who sit down and let their imaginations take flight, and b) the ones who sit down and struggle to produce what they think others expect from them.

Both of these techniques have benefits. The freewheeling, “imaginative” writer is usually more in touch with the subject of the piece and how to describe it, while the cautious, careful writer is usually more adept at meticulous revision.

Of course, both attitudes also have their pitfalls. The careful self-editor may have difficulty actually communicating, because of his desire to “get it right.” The imaginative writer can get so caught up in the moment that she loses the logical flow of the piece, overwrites, or fails to clear away errors in grammar, spelling, and style, leaving her reader confused.

Having observed this dichotomy, I now believe that best writing practice-- in fact maybe the only writing process that will reliably produce good work from nearly anyone-- is to pit these two writing methods against each other in order to augment their strengths and counteract their weaknesses.

Of course, there are as many ways to write as there are writers; I'm not talking about things like paper vs. digital, night vs. morning, spare time vs. full time, coffee shop vs. home office-- as important as these things are. What I am advocating is a two-pronged approach to getting your material down, whether on paper or in a cloud, and to refining its presentation.

I believe that regardless of the type of piece you're writing, when you first sit down to write your rough draft, you should do your utmost to give yourself freedom. You may have already done some freewriting or brainstorming, and that's great. But don't lose that easy, open attitude just yet. As you move into your first draft, keep the technical and stylistic demands of the project at bay a little while longer. Write, or as Charles Krauthammer does, dictate, freely-- as if you were talking to someone familiar.

This may take time and patience, especially if you're prone to editing every sentence as soon as it's written. And it's probably best, if you're doing a large project, to take small editing breaks, perhaps after each chapter. But the overall idea remains: let the draft come first, and then the revisions.

Once the first draft is done, it's time to step out of your mind. Some of you are liking this step because you feel like you're already there. But I mean it seriously--try to look at your writing through someone else's eyes. Note the places where you've taken the reader's knowledge for granted, failing to fully explain something. Look for the pesky grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes that trip the reader up. Ask someone else to read the piece and tell you the places where they lost track of your meaning.

For especially imaginative writers, this may be intensely challenging. Once the impetus of creativity is exhausted, slogging through the revision becomes a dreaded task to be hurried through or avoided. But don't let yourself down. If you went through the trouble of dreaming up the piece and tussling with its unruliness as you transcribed it, then put yourself through the trouble of sanding it down and polishing it up.

Above all, be ruthless. Be so ruthless that you can cut out your very favorite paragraphs if they don't add to the overall piece. Be so ruthless that you would rather start over than keep going on a piece that can't be edited out of its poor quality. Be so ruthless that, when it comes to your professional work, you won't accept less than your best work.

I wish I was more this way, but I loathe editing after the first couple of drafts. This has led me to the embarrassing position of having transform a blog that is equal parts portfolio and journal, and liberally sprinkled with errors, into a more coherent site that has been fully edited and corrected, even as I call myself a writer and write for other publications. Still, it will be worth it in the end, when my freely written pieces have been built up into freely readable pieces.

All in all, it's not a complicated process or an original idea: write freely, edit mercilessly. But it works; it really does. And you can't ask more of a “writing technique” than that.


You can learn more about Katharine Thorpe at her website  katharinethorpe.wordpress.com or check out her poetry book Distil.

Writing and Time Management--They Can Be Friends

I'm very fortunate. My full time job is that of a teacher--and not just any kind of teacher. I get to teach elementary Theatre Arts. It's a position that is full of fun, always gets the creativity flowing, and allows me to work with children. I'm blessed that I see all of the 700 students at my school in grades K-5, and that I have a chance to share with them a subject area that I really love.

It's also exhausting, full of behavior problems, and, in some circles, it is a job that goes largely unappreciated. Theatre is something you can't always hold in your hand and show to another person. It's not a worksheet or a test. It can be difficult to explain the purpose of everything you do while engaged in it. Unfortunately, that makes it seem less tangible to other teachers who believe if you can touch it and feel it, then it must be good. There is a certain view that what I do is unimportant and because I don't have to record grades or deal with tons of paperwork, my job has no real value.

It's a frustrating viewpoint, but after twelve years of hearing those snide remarks, I've learned to deal with it--for the most part. Mostly, when I hear those things, it makes me realize that the other person is really unhappy with what they are doing and think you should be unhappy, too. That's just sad.

But no matter how you view it, teaching Theatre is a full time job with its ups and downs like any other job. I'm often asked how I manage to work and crank out novels. Surely, I must be writing stories on my downtime in my classroom? How else could I possibly have the time to write?

 Well, it's called time management.

If you are serious about writing or do any freelance work, then you already know where I'm going with this. In order to be a writer who can get things done and still balance a full time job and a family, you have to manage your time. You have to set a writing schedule that works for you, your family, allows you to get other things done, and also have some fun.

Then you have to stick to it.

It's taken me about six years to figure out how to make it work for me. There's been lots of trial and error along the way. At first, I would get up about four in the morning and spend two hours writing before getting my daughter up and heading to work. Then I would write in the evening for several hours, too.

That sucked. After a full day of kids--some with behavior issues--exhaustion would catch up to me and the writing would not be anywhere near quality. I also wasn't able to really spend time with my family in the evenings.

So I dropped the early morning thing and just worked evenings and some weekends. That was better, but I continued to run into the same problem of being too tired after a work day. At that point, I'd also started to make connections with freelance clients and was starting to get paid to write articles, blog pieces, short stories, etc.

Juggling all of that is a little tough when you're worn out.

As the freelance side of my life started taking off, I realized I needed to look at it as more of a business and set up some rules for myself. I decided to only work on writing Saturday-Tuesday. The other days were off days where my brain could recharge. I set aside specific hours on Saturday and Sunday where I could get the bulk of my work done and then used Monday and Tuesday as "tweaking" days.

That schedule has made a world of difference! I can enjoy my full time job as a teacher, spend time with my family, and still get the writing for pleasure and business done.

It does take discipline. Not to mention drive and determination. However, if you want something bad enough, you'll do what you have to in order to make it happen. It's a commitment and I try to stick to it no matter what. Sure, I have days where things don't get done, and I sometimes have to shift things around in order to meet my obligations.

I never write at work--not even in my off time. Yes, I do check email or my blog stats. What can I say? It's a weakness, I know. But no writing. Daytime work is about theatre and kids. Nighttime is for writing.

If you are struggling with balancing your day job with your writing world, start looking at ways to manage your time better. It might mean having to give up something or asking your spouse for help with the kids, but if writing is something you want to embrace, you can only do that by making time for it.