Greet The Day

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Craft & Process

My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there.

Our kitchen is a disaster zone at the moment, too. So is our bathroom, our living room, and my car. Our bedroom is relatively well-composed, although I’m behind on cleaning the CPAP machine and that’s taking a toll on my sleep. 

Other disasters: my writing process, my publishing timeline, my PhD deadlines, my planning systems. Invisible chaos that’s largely unnoticeable unless you’re inside my head and trying to wade through the detritus in order to get things done.

The great temptation of chaos is this: nothing is fixable unless everything is flexible, and if you let things slide long enough, the very notion of getting ‘caught up’ is the stuff of nightmares and wry laughter. So you sink into the chaos, doing nothing.

There’s a logic to it: if I don’t wash the dishes, I don’t have to solve the problems with my PhD thesis. I don’t have to email the authors whose books weren’t getting released because BWF ate all my available spoons and threw off all my plans.

I don’t have to deal with the really complicated feelings I have around leaving the Festival, even though it was the right thing to do, or my fear around what happens next.

Of course, I’ve been here before, and I’ve got some pretty well-worn habits that kick in when chaos descends. First and foremost, I reach for Dan Charnas’ Everything In Its Place, and revisiting one of its very first lessons.  

On his way to work, LiPuma saw commuters dashing for the subway—flustered, sweating, stumbling—and the next day he’d see those same commuters rushing again. After working in the kitchen, LiPuma couldn’t understand what was wrong with these people. Why not get up a half-hour earlier? Wasn’t greeting your day better than fighting it? Why not make your kid’s lunch the night before, lay out your clothes, do anything you need to do so you can get up and not run around like a maniac so you can smile and enjoy your day? That was, after all, what LiPuma was beginning to do in the kitchen. Stress and chaos were a normal part of his job. But if he could control a little bit of that chaos—preparing for what he knew was going to happen—he could greet chaos, embrace it. His mastery of the expected would enable him to better deal with the unexpected. You plan what you can so you can deal with what you can’t.

Time to take a deep breathe and go back to first principles: Greet the day. Plan first, then arrange my spaces so they’re usable again. Clean as I go and focus on the next action, rather than extrapolating forward to the point of chaos and failure.

 I’m not a chef, but any writer knows that stress and chaos is a huge part of the job. You can’t control it, so your main job’s getting back to a space where you roll with the punches a little better. 

Routine Hacking and Emotional Triggers

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

When my life goes astray, my first port of call is always walking through my morning routines and figuring out where to make changes. Inevitably, I can track a minor thing that’s throwing my whole day off, which usually sees a flurry of experimentation as I find a work-around.

Back in January, mornings were a struggle, and I slowly worked through the stuff that’s changed to find solutions. At first, I blamed the issues on new medication that left me groggy and prone to dozing off in the mornings (aided, in part, by the addition of a daily Wordle). Going to bed earlier and shifting the Wordle check-in until after 8 AM has helped, but it didn’t quite get me back into a writing frame of mind.

So I started tracking where else my day was going astray and quickly realized a common point: sitting down to work on my desktop right after I drink my coffee.

The desktop in question is new, and basically a beast of a computer compared to my other devices. A massive upgrade, given I’ve primarily worked off laptops for a few years. I love writing on a desktop, and miss having a space where work can take place… but in January, with the unofficial lockdown that accompanied Australia’s Omicron wave of COVID, it’s also became the primary workspace for my day job at Brisbane Writers Festival.

Working on a festival program is stressful, especially when you’re not in synch with the person who has the most oversight. Factor in the last few months, which featured key staff departures, two months of frustrating my partner with work-from-home routines, and then a flood, and my stress levels were off the charts.

All this happened just as we were sheduled to go back into the office, post-Omicron, but the premises flooded along with the rest of Brisbane, earning us another week of work-from-home just as I was looking forward to getting out of the house. And with that, my morning routine has basically become wake up, make coffee, sit on the kitchen floor and weep at the futility of it all, after which I had no genuine desire to write.

So I started working off this theory: the desktop is an emotionally laden hotspot, where all my anger and resentment towards the job and its myriad difficulties overwhelm me. Given that I have nightmares about programming and schedules in the late stages of an event, it’s also hard to fight the feeling that I should work twenty-four seven in order to make the stress go away. In short, it’s an emotional trigger, and every single one of those emotions is an obstacle to getting writing work done.

The best way to sidestep all those emotions is to take the desktop out of the equation, so I adopted a double-barreled approach. First, I moved my pen-and-paper Journal to the space my keyboard occupies and tucked a writing notebook in behind it. They became the first thing I went to after waking up, and I got to spend spent the first hour of the day working with tools not-yet-contaminated by day-job anger. 

For the first time in 2022, I started the day focused.

This change was backed-up with a second choice: pulling the USB Wi-Fi from my computer, so I physically couldn’t log into work after I turned it on. A subtle change, but it edged my brain back from the desktop=work equation it was running and meant I could get a little writing done at the keyboard before connecting to the internet and its myriad distractions. Plus, the nice thing about starting focused: it’s easier to break the automated routine of mail-Facebook-Twitter-check book sales that’s become my habit at the start of the day.

Physically disabling the internet is always a good starting point if you’ve got urgent brainwork that doesn’t require it. I only wish I had a career where I didn’t need to be online as much through the bulk of my day.

But the lesson here: if your day isn’t running smoothly, trace your morning routine and look for the emotional surge that derails you from your intentions. We tend not to wake up in a high emotional state unless there’s an early trigger, and if you can figure it out, there’s always a simple work-around.

Context Matters

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

I recently waxed nostalgic about the heady days of 2008 to 2009, when it felt like my fiction writing career tracked along with far more promise than it does today. I was focused on my writing career to the exclusion of everything else, a host of stories were published and opportunities offered, and things felt possible in a way they don’t right now.

But a quick survey of the context in which I did all that work is pretty illuminating:

  • I was younger, newly single, and looking for distraction.
  • I was newly involved in the spec fic scene, and therefore a novelty.
  • Social media was relatively new, and work gained attention because it was easier to reach one’s friends and communities with news.
  • My father’s Parkinson’s disease was newly diagnosed, and hadn’t yet hit the point of physical and cognitive where I was increasingly conscious of both spending time with him and providing relief for my mum as his primary carer.
  • I was unemployed, providing both time and impetus to write.
  • I’d just gone through Clarion South, and emerged from those six weeks of focused work with a lot of heavily critiqued stories to finish up and submit.

That combination of time, necessity, and attention is a pretty powerful cocktail, and by 2011 its efficacy fading as my health, my dad’s health, social media, and my work situation changed.

Nostalgia’s a constant tempatation when what was feels out of reach here and now, but always remember that context matters.

No part of my life resembles the circumstances in which all that work was possible, and I’m unlikely to recreate them. Why expect the work to emerge at the same rate and quality as it did way back then?