I Am Not A Fully Operational Death Star

To the shock of absolutely no-one, I was considerably less productive on the writing front than expected over the holidays.

I last wrote on my last full day at work two weeks ago, and I’m picking this draft up on the 5th of January (coincidentally, my first day on a bus since moving house in late December).

The version you are reading now didn’t actually get finished until the end of January, three weeks after I thought I’d figure out the final draft. Things, my friends, did not go to plan.

Which shouldn’t surprise any writer who has gone through a holiday season more than once.

I’ve touched base with many writer friends over the last few weeks, and “less than expected” is a pretty common refrain when talking about their holidays.

Very few folks actually planned to do nothing over December and January — writers are exceptionally bad at taking weekends off, let alone extended breaks — but no-one seemed to have the knock-it-out-of-the-park kind of holiday season they’d hoped for.

If you’ve thought something similar, let us talk about why the holidays are hard on writers and the December/January period is not as effective as we’d hoped. 

1) OUR PRIORITIES ARE NOT WHAT WE THINK THEY ARE

When I sit down with new writers I mentor, one of the first things I get them to do is build a priority pyramid with some index cards. I want them to physically move around their commitments and ambitious and create a hierarchy because sometimes we all need to see that writing is not our immediate priority. 

Sometimes, it’s not even our third or fourth most important thing on our list.

This is important because the social narrative around writing and creativity makes it seem like it must be an all-consuming thing. The first and most important priority in your life. To do otherwise is to risk being seen as gasp an amateur, or even someone who doesn’t take their creative practice seriously.

When that narrative gets its hooks into you, it’s easy to feel guilty about taking a day off or putting Christmas shopping ahead of getting your word count done. It’s easy to feel like your failure to be writing all the time is responsible for any lack of success you’re feeling, and things would be better if you just dropped every other commitment in your life and wrote to the point of burn-out twenty-four seven.

This narrative sucks on its own, but when you combine it with the social narratives around Christmas, which tells us family and togetherness should also be your top priority and you’re a bad person if you don’t get into the holiday spirit….

Well, the conflicting messages can be a source of anxiety if you don’t examine them. I know from experience that writing is often in the top five things that I care about, but I also know what it’s not more important than. My wife trumps writing. So do my family and my cats, and—often—my friends. 

I can maintain a writing routine steady against things like day jobs, but I will down tools in a heartbeat to manage a crisis related to any of the above.

Even beyond that, priorities are flexible and contextual. Moving came with a deadline, made life better for some of my top priorities (my wife and cats), and required a shit ton of effort and attention. It outranked almost everything else while we were transporting furniture (even then; we ditched moving for a few hours to take a cat to the emergency vet when she got a bloody nose and we couldn’t determine the source).

Moving trumps writing, and even a lot of Christmas commitments, over the last two weeks. It will trumped a lot more through to the end of January, when we got the last of our stuff out of the old place. Preparing the old flat for someone else to inhabit will probably kick my writing routine in the teeth a few times through February as well.

And that’s okay. 

I’m knowingly setting writing aside in order to get the moving done, knowing that it will improve a whole lot of other things and, ultimately, open up more opportunities to write than I’ve had in the past.

It’s surprisingly easy for us to lose track of what’s really got our attention, which is why I use tools like priority pyramids and regularly journaling to see what’s on my mind and what I’m really focused on. It’s ever-changing and far more malleable than many folks think, and the end-of-year holiday season hits harder than most. 

2) WE LOSE OUR KEYSTONE HABITS

Like many folks, habit and routine sustain my writing process. I write when I get on a bus these days, and it feels weird when I can’t. Getting to that point has been a process, but I focused on it because I’d identified my commute as the window with time for writing. 

I used to write first thing after getting up, or when I got home from work. Other times, I set alarms that let me know it was time to begin. Comics writer Kelly Sue Demonic used to talk about lighting a candle in her office when she started work, then blowing it out when she finished. A simple ritual that trained her brain to be “on” at the start of a writing day, and turn “off” the narrative instincts when it was time to shut down.

There’s a lot of books about habit formation out there these days, and much of it talks about the way we string unconscious, habitual actions together.

If we drive to work on the same roads every morning, eventually the route becomes muscle memory. If we write every day after getting home from work, eventually we don’t have to think about writing—it will just become a thing we do after walking through the door.

But habits acrette over time: they all have a trigger, and if you remove that trigger, the habitual behaviour needs to be replaced by conscious effort. Encounter road work on your usual route to work, forcing you to find an alternate way in, becomes an annoyance because you have to think about something that used to be routine. 

Sitting down to write without the trigger of coming home (or stepping onto a bus, or lighting a candle, or setting a pomodoro timer) takes more cognitive energy. We have to think about writing rather than simply doing it because that’s when the writing gets done. Instead of sitting down to write because we encontered the trigger that said hey, it’s writing time, we have to physically coax ourselves to the keyboard and remind ourselves that writing needs to be done.

That’s harder.

It takes more energy.

And holidays often break our routines in messy ways. 

Not only are the rituals and habits around getting to work gone, but we’re packing new things into our time. Exceptions to the norm become the norm. Habits don’t stand a chance.

The trick here isn’t lamenting what didn’t get done—it’s about looking at what habits you need to re-establish (or build from scratch) now things are returning to ‘normal’.

3) WE’RE ALMOST NEVER A FULLY OPERATIONAL DEATH STAR ANYWAY

Another truism of many writers: we think we can do more than we actually can. I often plan out my year under the assumption that I’ll write 600,000 words—a perfectly feasible amount if you looked at my “good” writing weeks and extrapolated outwards. 

In practice, I can write about 300,000 words a year because the “good” writing days are not common. I estimate based on optimal conditions, but in practice conditions are never perfect. I’ve got the occasional bout of rocky mental health or exhaustion, courtesy of my sleep condition. Or I’ll need to cover household duties when my partner’s chronic illness kicks in and takes them out of commission. 

There’s a trick I’ve been using for years, originally pulled from Maggie Stiefvater’s late, lamented Tumblr. I start my day by assigning myself a “percentage of optimal” score, with 100% being in a state that feels like I’m firing on all cylinders and 10% being “barely functional”. I then set my expectations against that percentage – for example, if I think an optimal day is 2000 words, a 40% day would be 800.

After a few years of tracking how I feel in the morning, I usually wake up feeling somewhere between 40 and 60 percent. It’s a damn good week if I find myself in the seventy to eighty percent band more than once. 

I’m almost never 100%. I will never be a fully operational Death Star. 

When I sit down to plan out projects with mentee, I always ask them what they think a “reasonable” amount of time is to finish their project. Then I tell them to double it when we lay out our plans, because things will never move as fast as you think. 

We’re almost never a fully operational Death Star, which is perfectly fine. Even a half-built Death Star is dangerous as fuck (and, hopefully, you’re using your Death Star plans for something more productive than blowing up planets and terrorising the galaxy).