Recently, I made the decision to stop working from home. I don’t write there, I don’t produce blog posts there, and I do my best to avoid spending time on the PC answering email or doing writing-based social media. I barely even take notes in my bullet journal, or break out a notebook for planning.
This decision was largely made because I share a one-bedroom apartment with my partner. A very small one-bedroom apartment, split between two people who were used to living alone. And two people who have had their fare share of mental health challenges, with their respective coping mechanisms built around time alone. This had consequences: working from home meant my partner felt bad about taking a day off work when sick or in need of a break, because it meant disrupting my work routine. Working from home also meant there was no clear delineation between me-at-work, and me-at-home, so there was never a sense that I was officially done for the day and shifting my focus to our life together instead of the imaginary people in my head.
The last few weeks have been a remarkable change in our routines. Now, instead of starting the day by making coffee and slumping to my desk (or, more accurately, dragging my laptop to the couch), I get up and catch a . train to uni where I spend 8 hours at my desk in the post-graduate office. I write for a long burst, walk around the central courtyard when I need a break, then sit down and write again.
On the surface, it’s the same writing process I used at home, except for one essential difference: when 3:00 PM hits and I start thinking I’ve maybe done enough for the day, I sit back and the computer and keep working for another two and a half hours.
At home, this would be the time to do groceries. Or fit in a little chores. Things that needed to be done, and therefore were a suitable use of time once I’d achieved a certain number of words for the day.
And this is the big psychological difference about going to work: stopping at 3:00 PM would feel like I’m skipping out on work early, instead of transitioning to another urgent job. The line between writing-work and domestic work is cleanly underscored by shutting down the PC and commuting home.
It kinda feels like I’ve found two extra hours every day, enough to generate between 800 and 1000 extra words based upon my project tracking over the last few weeks. Part of me wonders why I didn’t do this years ago.
The answer, of course, is none of this was an option. Even when I worked part-time, with dedicated writing days, I didn’t have access to resources like a dedicated desk and scholarship income that made it feasible. Nor would it be possible if I were fretting more about money, watching my budget scrupulously and looking for places to cut.
I am in a magical place where time and resources allow me to make certain choices, and that’s resulting in a kind of focus and productivity I haven’t managed in years. It’s largely the result of spending some quality time reading about various writers process, and in particular articles like this one about Nora Robert’s productivity.
Which brings us to something that often comes up when we talk about writing and time.
WE ALL HAVE THE SAME TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
So there’s this thing that writers tend to say whenever they talking to new writers about getting things finished: you won’t find the time to write, you have to make it. We all have the same twenty-four hours.
The intentions here aren’t necessarily bad. I know this because I’ve said it myself, when talking to new writers. It’s an attempt to shock people into putting their focus on the act of writing, a reminder that writing is work instead of some mythical experience where muses pour art into your head and everything comes out perfect.
It’s passing on what every writer knows: If you want to write, you do need to devote time to the act, carve out space in your weekly routine to get words on the page. Because, let’s be clear, the world does not want you to write. Or, to put it another way, distractions are abundant. People are rarely cognisant of what’s involved in getting creative work done, and the external rewards are few and often distant. Finding reasons to not-write is much easier than sitting down and doing the work, and convincing people what you’re doing is work is damn near impossible prior to a certain level of success where it seems like you’re doing something ‘productive.’
If you don’t focus on getting writing done, it doesn’t get done. This is true regardless of whether you’re starting out, or half-way through your career. Your focus is a powerful thing, and it’s the precursor to taking action.
Choosing to focus on writing is a thing.
But while there are only twenty-four hours in the day, it’s not always fair to pretend those hours are equal. The way you get to use them is highly dependant on your situation, the things you value in your life, and where you writing fits into that schemata.
On a really simple level, money matters: it’s a lot easier to squeeze writing time out of your day when you’ve got a fifteen minute drive to and from work, compared to the folks who spend an hour each way on a packed-to-the-gills bus or train. Or when you can pay for childcare to take the kids off your hands, or someone to come in and help with the cleaning. Heck, even my old trick of letting cleaning slide and living on takeout in order to meet a deadline is something I could only get away with while living alone. I’m okay with kicking the crap out of my health–physical and mental–while focusing on a deadline, but I’m totally not okay with subjecting my partner to that. I did it once, just prior to my PhD confirmation, and it resulted in a whole lot of anxiety for us both.
Similarly, it’s a lot easier to fence-off those work hours out of your day when you’re healthy, and young enough that the meat-suit you walk around in still functions relatively well without a diligent approach to daily exercise. Or when your partner is invested in the idea of you being a writer, and aids you in finding the tie. Or when your mental health is spic-and-span, and your not plagued by stress, anxiety, or depression.
It’s easier to find the time to write when your getting eight hours of sleep a night, or when you housing and income is stable enough that you’re not battling the subconscious narrative that the hours you’re spending on this project are a solid use of time on par with working extra hours, or searching for a job, or doing some short-term gig that will pay next week’s rent.
And while this seems like an extreme example, talk to any newly minted freelancer–folks who had solid work ethics and outputs when they were splitting time between writing and a dayjob–and there’s a good chance they’ve started losing work-hours to the stress and scramble of a lifestyle without a regular paycheque. It’s just the way things go.
There’s a lot of intersecting issues about wealth, class, gender, and lifestyle that make it easier for some people to find time to write than others. We all have the same twenty-four hours, but our capacity to expend our labour on the act of writing is not equally distributed.
THE MYTH OF “YOU HAVE TO WANT IT”
Implicit in the advice that we all have the same twenty-four hours is the assumption that the people who want it badly enough will make it work.
People write their first novels on commutes, writers will tell you. Or, They get up earlier, give up sleep in the name of their art. As if such options were available to everyone, and yield effective results.
I’ve tried both these things in the past. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes they exacerbated the yet-to-be diagnosed medical condition that was kicking my process in the teeth and making everything a struggle
The cultural myths around writing says that you should give everything you have to your art, to the point where it destroys you. Look at countless writers and artists like Hemmingway, geniuses who were so consumed by their art he drank to cope and finally ended in tragedy.
And yeah, there will always be people who value their art above and beyond everything else in their lives. We tend to lionize their achievements, because it plays into cultural myths about creativity and being consumed by our art.
Often, we overlook the fact these people are basically assholes, with a very poor sense of work/life balance.
Truth is, its not always a good thing to be consumed by art. Sometimes, the people who make it aren’t there because they wanted it more, or were better at sacrificing things in order to get work done.
Sometimes they wanted it exactly as bad as you did, but they had less things that got in their way at pivotal times. Their parents didn’t get sick unexpected, requiring long-term care. Their partner understood the writing thing a little better, which made it easier to negotiate the time and mental space they needed to get shit done.
Sometimes they were just better at the solitude things, saying ‘no’ so social obligations and spending time with friends and family. They could go long hours–days even–without seeing people quite easily, or accepted that it was necessary to achieve the things they wanted to achieve and accepted the consequences.
We like to think of the twenty-four hour day as an equitably distributed thing, but it’s not. The plea that we all have the same twenty-four hours is largely about getting folks to recognise that we’re bad at planning out our time, but sometimes the problem isn’t that you’re bad at planning.
YOU DO NEED TO MAKE TIME TO WRITE, BUT IT NEEDS TO FIT YOUR LIFE AND VALUES
Part of that process of carving out time–particularly when you’re starting out–comes down to figuring out what you can sacrifice in order to get writing done. Many folks glibly suggest starting with social media and TV, telling you with obvious pride about the last time they saw a movie back in 1993. This involves making assumptions.
Sometimes its true–many of us are wasting more time on social media than we truly realise (and signing up for a service like RescueTime can be illuminating in that regard)–but it can also be like the budgeting experts who write one-size-fits-all advice about saving $3,000 a year by giving up their morning latte.
For some folks, it’s a wake-up call. For other, a reason to snort and think, “if I had $3,000 for a latte every morning, I wouldn’t be reading your goddamn blog/book.” The assumption obscures the principle of the advice, and puts the focus on the action.
The ease with which you carve up your twenty-four hours and make time to write is highly dependant on your situation, and where writing sits on the list of things you value. And, lets be clear, even thinking you have the option of putting writing at the top of your priority list suggests a level of privilege you can’t assume will be there for everybody. Many of us have families, loved ones, day-jobs and landlords that have reasonable expectations that we’ll pay our rent.
Many of us have things we aren’t willing to give up, because they’re more important than writing. Sometimes we give them up anyway, because the myth of being consumed by your art is so very strong, and we end up getting kicked in the teeth by our own decisions.
YOU DO HAVE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
But they’re yours, shaped and influenced by the realities of your life and the things that are important to you.
Pretending those the same as Stephen King’s hours, or Nora Roberts’ hours, or mine, or any other person talking about their process…man, that’s not the way it works.
It’s worth being cognisant of the privilege and differences between your life and the process of whatever writing is offering advice. It’s fantastic that I have access to the things that make my current process possible – eight hours of time to devote to the task of writing, a desk at a university and a means to commute there– but I can do this because I’m a privileged mother-fucker (even more-so than the time I wrote the blog attached to that link).
The advantages I started with allowed me to make choices that prioritised writing experience, which led to jobs in the industry and published stories/articles and eventually a PhD scholarship. On a word-count expected versus dollars-coming-in rate, I’m willing to bet its the best I’ll ever get paid to sit down and do the thing I love for a period of three years.
I still worked to get here. I made choices and decisions about how to use my twenty-four hours, and a lot of those involved doing things I didn’t want to do and sacrificing some goals in favour of others.
But, I’ll be clear: I didn’t necessarily want it more than other people. I fucked around just as often as I worked my ass off. I had weeks where carving out writing time was just plain hard, and at least a year where I figured I was done with writing for good.
And the twenty-four hours I’m working with today are considerably different compared to the bulk of Mondays I’ve experienced in my lifetime. I sit here with the knowledge that the things I do today will not be replicable in two years time, when the degree is over and I’m on to the next thing, fitting writing around a part-time job or freelance work or publishing.
Similarly, when we look at Nora Robert’s process at the end of her life, with grown kids, best-sellers, and six books coming out every year, it’s probably very different to the process at the start when she was a single mum whose kids lived at home.
We all have twenty-four hours to work with, but they’re sure as fuck not the same. And the shitty part is those differences matter when you start looking at how you build your career…and how rapidly your career can take off.
Most writers work their asses off: this much is true. But the folks who can prioritise writing more easily are prone to getting more work out, faster. The folks who can access networking and skill-building opportunities can leverage the hours spent on their craft more effectively than those who do not.
Figuring out where writing fits into your twenty-four hours is always going to be a very personal thing.
