Making Time, Picking Your Focus, and the ‘Fuck You’ Impulse

Earlier this year, I noticed this Tweet on my feed and flagged it as something I wanted to think about more:

“Oh, I’d love to write a book but I just don’t have time!”

Fuck. You.

I wrote my first two novels during my lunch hours in a 9-5 job while also teaching and training kung fu every evening and weekend. You make time.

— Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) March 10, 2019

I was intrigued by the tweet, for two reasons. On hand it, it’s because Alan is right about this–something that’s bourn out in the suite of writers that offer their own experiences making time to get work done in the early days. It’s a useful read, if you’re interested in being a writer. The kind of advice I’ve been talking about in writing classes for years, among the self-selecting people who show up to learn such things.

But I found myself really irritated at the tweet when it first appeared, and had to bite down on the urge to be really snarky about the post. There’s a certain thread of writing advice that’s really driven by this kind of anger, a fuck-you impulse directed at people who haven’t yet realised what it takes to write.

And, while I’ve given into that impulse myself on more than one occasion, I’m also bothered by it. While it sets out to combat the mythology of writing and creativity, I fret about the way it also reinforces them.

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Fuck you. You make the time.

We like to present this like an epiphany, we writers who do exactly that, rearranging our lives to put more focus on the task of getting writing done.

Sadly, I do not think it’s news to anyone. We all have ambitions we are ignoring for reasons we blame on time, but actually has a lot more to do with our priorities and ingrained habits that govern our daily activities.

And this is the great lesson of reading project management and time management books, because they all tend to boil down to the same handful of points:

• You don’t make time, you refocus on your priorities to start on the things that matter most.
• Adjust your habits to use your minutes better, and reduce the number of conscious decisions you need to make during the process by separating out planning and process. .
• You address the things that keep you distracted, eliminating the hesitation to get started on the things that matter.

Truthfully, writer’s don’t make time, they learn to prioritise writing and see value in giving it focus. They give it time because writing matters to them, and its value–potential or actual–is higher than a suite of other activities that could fill those particular moments.

Not an insignificant decision, in an age dominated by distraction.

Not an insignificant thing at all, in a culture that devalues art and the associated work of telling stories and puts the focus on the epiphany behind a story instead of craft and diligent progress.

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As someone whose had their fair share of social anxiety, my reading of Ellen Hendriksen’s popular science book on the subject was a chain of mild epiphanies filling in gaps that counselling and medication hadn’t touched yet. Look at this, she’d explain, here’s how that thing you do when you’re alone is actually social anxiety at work. Here’s how the way you approach certain work-tasks is driven by the same impulse as your need to avoid large crowds. Here’s all the way this kind of anxiety is normal, and only becomes a problem when it drowns out everything else and incapacitates you.

The chapter that really opened my eyes came with the discussion about anxiety and anger, and the tendency for one-in-five socially anxious people to go on the attack instead of trying for avoidance behaviours. Hendrickson famed a really good example of how the mindset goes:

Vivian’s standards were so high, so rigid, that in her eyes she herself barely made the cut of even deserving to be alive. She had fully bought into the myth of I have to perform perfectly. Her anxiety and discomfort ate away at her self-esteem and made her feel worthless. But she saw others, as she said, “walking around like, ‘Of course I deserve to be here,’” which to Vivian made them seem entitled and arrogant. And that made her angry, at both herself and others. But in reality, other people were simply normal. For Vivian, the gap between her ability and her expectations was huge, not because her abilities were low but because her expectations were too high. How dare others have confidence! They weren’t struggling nearly as much as Vivian.

Hendriksen, Ellen. How to Be Yourself

The example resonated for me, because I knew that dynamic intimately. That kind of anger—that ‘fuck you, how dare you’ impulse—has kicked in during so many conversations I’ve been in when writers talk about other writers. How dare they have confidence this will be easy! How dare they be ignorant of the work! How dare they assume this will not be a struggle equal to my struggle! How dare they talk about being a writer when they aren’t chasing it with everything they’ve got like I do!

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Writers do not have a lot of control over their careers. There is no one-to-one relationship between hours worked and financial reward. The decision to build your life around freelance writing, rather than a hobby, is an open invitation for more anxiety than most people live with.

Which means the Fuck You! impulse is strong among many writers of my acquaintance. It’s a natural response to the weird dynamics established by the way we conceptualise creativity as a culture:

• Our cultural mythology overvalues the moment of epiphany and inspiration, and devalues the craft and time required to bring those ideas to fruition;
• We insist that art is a cultural gift and treat it as enormously valuable in abstract, but devalue the work of any artist who aspires to commercial success;
• We valorise artists who are consumed by their work to the point of mental health problems or addiction, and devalue those who produce steadily and with diligent, healthy practices.
• The true value of a work lies in its originality and the touch of the artist, not in its reproduction.

To aspire to any creative activity in a professional is to live with contradictory, maddening messages about how your time, process, and work is valued.

You need the fuck you impulse. To a certain extent, it’s the only way any creative work gets done. Fuck you, I’m going to do this. Fuck you, I can set my own priorities.

Fuck you, this is worth it.

But it’s hard to escape the doubt with so many voices shouting at you. It’s hard to know when the Fuck You crosses the line, when defiance becomes defensive anger to quiet the doubts.

It’s hard to know when the fuck you isn’t dispelling those myths, and about trying to reinforce them: if you want to write, you sacrifice things. If you want to make art, you must suffer.

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Most people don’t know what it takes to be a working artist. They don’t know how to get published, or how much artists get paid. They sure as shit don’t know how writers build a business, because the presentation of working artists in contemporary culture revolves around the extremes of phenomenal success or abject failure.

The media focuses on the outliers, the exceptions that make a great yarn. JK Rowling’s years of rejection prior to becoming the biggest author in the world. Stephen King worrying about buying medication for his kids, then exploding with the publication of Carrie. The self-publishing superstars who are making millions by rejecting the traditional system.

When it swings the other way, the focus is on poverty: the average author earns $5000 a year, and that number is dropping! Millions of people self-publish their books and earn single digit incomes every month! I published one boo and couldn’t support myself as a writer—OMG the system is broken now and things were better in the old days!

If that’s all you know—if writing looks like a crazy gamble—why would you bother making time and pushing it up the list of priorities? Unless you felt a burning desire to write against all odds, how in hell would it be a better use of your time than, say, actually taking a break from work on your lunch break?

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My first response to Alan’s tweet, when it scrolled up through my twitter feed, was indeed fuck you. It just wasn’t aimed at the imaginary speaker he was writing about—it was aimed at Alan himself.

• Fuck you, you don’t get to police people’s priorities for them.
• Fuck you, not all hours are created equally.
• Fuck you, this frames the entire thing as artists being special because they make time.
• Fuck you, I fucking hate this masochist look at ‘what I’m sacrificing’ approach to framing writing.

Once or twice, I came close to putting a response on Twitter, leaning heavily on the snark. I pulled back and thought about it, because I could see that response becoming a self-perpetuating thing. One tweet becoming many, drawing my focus back to the platform when I wanted it to be elsewhere.

That impulse stuck with for a few reasons. Partially because I was having a bad week already, where making time wasn’t exactly easy and the idea of using lunch breaks seems laughably simple.

Partially, because I could see more complicated nuance and wanted people to think about it, but didn’t have the spoons to explain it with everything going on at the time.

And partially, because that’s what Twitter encourages: placing the merit on its immediacy of a response rather than depth and reflection. Exactly the thing I was trying to combat by limiting my time, and using my spare moments for other things.

I actually like everything in Alan’s twitter thread, bar the Fuck You. And, let us be honest, my dislike of the Fuck You is complicated and situational.

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I’m frustrated by the shifts in priorities at the moment: the choices that need to be made, the way priorities need to shift. The parts of my process—and to a certain extent, my identity—that need to be adjusted or given up in order to be the person I want to be in other parts of my life.

I can get writing done with everything that’s going on, but I can’t be as productive as I’d like. I can’t split my focus across projects, I’m less confident about the timeline set up for my PhD, and I’m irritated that my focus needs to shift from “how does this work contribute to my career goals” to “how do I get something done this week.”

I’m irritated that there are days when I’m not going to write at all—My partner sees less of me at the moment, as do my friends. My diet is taking a beating because I’m grabbing food on the go a bunch of the time, and stress-eating a lot of the time when I’m home because…well, stress, and trying to conserve the brain I’ve got for decisions for the moments I really need it.

In short, the thing I’m making time for isn’t always writing. I’m trying to make time for connecting with the people I care about, and trying to make time for me and my own damn health.

Some days, that means having the brain space to write, but needing to make choices to support other people.Some days, that means having the brain space to write, but choosing to do the annoying self-care things instead: getting enough sleep, eating a proper meal. Going for a walk.

When you’re used to having writing be a big priority, those decisions are really hard. Those cultural myths around creativity keep whispering: if you’re not consumed by your art to the exclusion of all else—yes, even this—then you’re inevitably going to be a failure.

Halfway through yesterday, irritated for reasons I didn’t really understand, it occurred to me that blogging had become the metric by which I measured the state of things. So long as I write and post, things are not really that bad.

But the truth is, I made a choice. I chose my partner when I had free time. I chose getting enough sleep, taking easy on myself, getting done what I could get done.

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This tweet scrolled through my feed a few days earlier than the one that triggered this post, courtesy of Roxane Gay. I have the same conversation with students from time to time–a conversation that often provokes the same fuck you impulse as folks who’d like to write a book.

I really like Gay’s way of responding to it:

I am always, always curious what students think the response should be when they ask, "is it okay to miss class so I can do this other thing?" I now say, "That's a decision you have to make for yourself."

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 4, 2019

Her theory, explained in a later tweet, is that the question is about absolution rather than permission. While it’s frustrating when a student skips class as a teacher, the student knows their own life better than Gay ever will.

Which is often what it feels like, when you’re a writer and you prioritize writing, and other people start talking about time. It’s not, tell me how to find time, but absolve me of the choice to pursue other things with those minutes and hours.

I’m intrigued by this, and wonder if it has some value in the situations where the fuck you impulse kicks in around writing discussions. The subtle way the attention is put back on the other person’s choice to not-write, rather than elevating the self.

“I don’t have time” is never about time, it’s about priorities and focus.