Best laid plans

This week, I'm having the week from hell as far as time goes. I have two lots of marking to do -- something I try to avoid as far as I can. And indeed I'd staggered these assessment tasks so that one was coming in last week, but then Higher Ed called a strike and, because they'd be picketing the gates, I pushed back the assessment task a week. Now that's the shortened version of the story, but close enough for the purposes of this blog as to why it was moved. 

Fine, I was going to have a big week marking. No problems. I'd finished my Ada Cambridge shortlisting, and was waiting for a manuscript I'm supposed to be editing for a small press publisher. All I had to do was be focused, not waste a second, mark, and I ought to be able to write as well.

Tuesday, I worked all day -- got home at ten thirty pm, only to find out I had to go to a funeral on Wednesday. Normally, I'd have writing group, so some of this time wouldn't have been spent marking anyway, but it did mean driving over the other side of town (an hour each way). But I'm not complaining. I had to go. I wanted to go. Sometimes these things happen, and part of living a writer's life is living a life, and that involves commitments and family time and all of that. (And, anyway, I had spent the morning marking.)

Thursday, though, I spend the day in hospital, taking my son to a fracture clinic. This involved several lots of waiting, casts being taken off and put back on, Xrays, the works, and by the time I got home in the late afternoon, I felt flat. What I didn't know was I was getting sick.

So, I spent Friday laid up. No, that's not exactly true. I spent the first couple of hours ferrying around my son, but that's a long and irrelevant story. Suffice to say, by the time I got home I had a fever and was aching all over, so that was really it for the day. I rarely have sick days, so shouldn't complain -- but couldn't it have been another week?

So, today, I'm marking like mad. Tomorrow too. Monday is class prep, perhaps workshopping. Perhaps more marking?

Somewhere in the next two days I might also need to hop back over to the other side of town, as another family member is desperately ill. And I don't use that adverb lightly.

And I have to do some writing. I have to squeeze it in somewhere. I could put it back a few more days -- I haven't done any since Monday, so what's the difference? The difference is that I'll rise further and further out of our story. I've just blogged about my writing process on our student blog and talked about how important immersion is for me. What I don't want is to emerge from the story, and I will if I don't get back in, quick smart.

I still come back to hearing Robin Hobb speak at one of the SF conferences in Melbourne a few years ago, and she said that we would never have more time to write than we have now. It's a sobering thought, and a true one. Life is precious. And it's short. And as busy as Flinders Street Station. Whenever you have free time, you have a million things that want to fill it, that want to cram out every writing moment. At least I do. I listen with envy to people who say they are bored. How does anyone get time to be bored? I mean, really. Boredom -- what is that? A luxury, I say, to those who have computers and want to write.

Living a writing life

This year, I increased my time-fraction at work from 0.4 to 0.6 (two days a week to three). Now, the number of days a week I work is a bit laughable really -- it's teaching, and that means lots of marking and in our cases workshopping at home.  Some people are able to do some of their prep/marking at work, but we have to do admin work like answering phones and student enquiries and various other things, so we almost never get this luxury.

As well, I've taught a new subject, which is always a heap more work -- lots of extra unpaid work for sure, but work that is rewarding, nonetheless, as we research our subjects, looking for great writing exercises, better understanding, in-depth explanations or whatever. So, while it's a bind, it's also very rewarding.

Also, in second semester I've taught an online subject, which means my time-fraction has effectively been 0.8. I feel like my whole life has become teaching.

On the one hand it's been great. The Gadget Man was out of work for much of last year, and we ate up all our savings and then some, so it's been nice to have a bit more income and try to catch up on debts and stuff. The worst part about it has been the effect on my writing, which has really fallen away, especially as the semester progressed. 

There is one thing writers do, and that's write. Well, there are a lot of other things too, but writing is the main one. And there is no better time than the present -- we will, none of us, ever have more time than right now. It is a truth among writers, universally acknowledged. (See, all that Austen is rubbing off!) 

And yet . . . 

And yet sometimes the things we do, the choices we make, affect more than just the amount of time we have for writing. The amount of headspace is also affected.

Teaching is not the ideal job for writers. A lot of our creative energy goes into our students, into their work. We're left scrabbling with what's left over. (Neither, as my friend E will attest, is writing (nonfic) the best job for fiction writers. Again, all that creative energy is poured out into the daily grind. Not the most conducive for going home after work and settling again in front of a computer.)

The year before I started teaching, I was writing about 30,000 words/month. My best month was about 50,000. In one of my early years in teaching, I wrote a short story in January and another in December and nothing in between. Signing a writing contract with my students has helped keep me more honest than that, but this year has been particularly hard. And has left me with a decision. Do I keep with the higher time-fraction or drop back?

There are no correct answers to this question. Commitment is something I often talk about with my students. How much you commit is all a matter of what's right for you. The best writers are often selfish with their time -- and perhaps you don't want to be. 

It's the same in any field of art -- I remember watching an interview with Bill Cosby and his talking about his selfishness in his early years of acting and how he regretted the time he lost with his family, but his acknowledgment that he wouldn't have been where he was without that.

No-one has the right to decide our priorities for us. It's something each of us must do for ourselves -- weighing up what we want out of life and how much we're prepared to pay for it, in terms of what it will cost not just in terms of dedication and hard work, but also in sacrifices.

After long discussions with my family, I've decided to cut back on my hours. The person I am when I'm not writing is an angry, frustrated person: one I don't like very much. I'd much rather be less well off financially and more whole spiritually, because that's what writing does for me.

Back to the novel

The best way to write is to write a little every day. There are a thousand excuses we can find not to do this, and I have times where I seem able to exercise them all. But the hard truth is the writing flows best when we are at it every day -- it is then that the juice oozes. The words come easier, and the ideas zing.

I would like to say I'm capable of writing every day, and that I manage to achieve this, but it would be a lie. I invest a lot of time into my students -- into workshopping their work, into preparing classes -- and this year, teaching a new class (always a big time consumer), and this semester doing double my workload is really taking its toll. It leaves me thinking that next year I have to cut back my hours: after all, I'm a writer, and I want to write.

James N. Frey talks about this in his book How to write damn good fiction. One of his chapters is on the seven deadly mistakes a writer can make, and one of these is leading the wrong lifestyle. He tells of the advice he gave a would-be writer whose husband was an obstacle between her and the writer's lifestyle, and that was to get a new husband! While I do think that extreme, we do, in the end, have to decide on our priorities: what it is we want to achieve and what we're prepared to pay for that. There are no right and wrong answers -- only answers that suit you and your circumstances. What if your job is interfering with your writing? It's up to you to decide what to do. I've known people who have been in a position of having to choose and who have gone with their job. Sometimes, they've admitted to a great sense of relief on having made that decision. That's all right. They might come back to writing one day, and they might not. The world has enough writers; what it needs -- what we all need -- is more readers.

Think about it. The writing life is a hard one. There is little financial gain for most of us. After all, how many hairdressers can make a living out of hairdressing in this country? How many writers? Even of the best writers in the country, most have to supplement their income. And we're already talking only of those in the top echelon who get published. Much easier to be a hairdresser. Or bank-teller. Or anything really. It's a life full of rejection (unless you're one of a very elite few like Isobelle Carmody, who has never had a rejection letter), a life of harsh criticism and pulling yourself together and getting your work out there again and again and again.

But we have to do it.

We are driven.

And those who do give it up often come back to it. Writing is the nectar that feeds us.

Those struggling to find time, do find ways of carving out a niche here or there. Or don't.

I know when I'm not writing, I feel angry and frustrated. I am filled with self-loathing at my own patheticness. But when I finally unstopper that testube, then the creative potion fizzes up, a flood of it. In the meantime, I keep it ticking in my head. I think about my characters; I play out scenes in my imagination -- even scenes I've already written. I flesh out backstories, and sometimes, sometimes, I get fired up enough to find the time I need to write.

The hardest but most important word for writers

I'm one of those people who hate saying No to people, so I hate it when people come asking for favours. Often it's because I work part-time -- so obviously I have a lot of free time on my hands. I don't. I'm currently teaching 0.6, but have taken on an online subject, which I guess makes me 0.8. When I was 0.4, my husband reckoned I did the same work as a full-time worker, which some weeks would be an over-exaggeration, but on marking weeks would be an under-exaggeration. I go to a writing group one afternoon a week and have stuff I have to do for them. I have home commitments (as most of us do), and writing commitments. Other people don't get that.

Writing commitments -- what are they? Surely, writing is that stuff you squeeze into your spare time -- and other people see their pulls on my time as more important than anything squeezed into spare time. Sorry, but they're not. Today, I had an email from someone who wanted me to look over a chunk of manuscript. Writing related, sure, but I had to say no. It made me feel rotten -- truly -- but I'm not getting enough time for my novel at the moment, and that *has* to be my priority. 

For others, other people (or tasks) demand time for less writerly reasons. It might be the neighbour -- whose concerns and needs are genuine. It might be a mother or father, a cousin or aunt. It might be the man in the butcher's shop, or the girl you see by the lake. In the end it's up to us: we have to decide whether we want to write or not. 

A few years ago, Robin Hobb spoke at a Melbourne SF convention. In her Guest of Honour speech she said something along the lines of: you will never have more time to write than now. If you put off your writing until you retire, or until your neighbour moves out or whatever, you won't write because there will always be new demands on your time. If I got nothing else out of that con, it was worth going just to hear that. It's one of the great truths of writing. Write it down and stick it by your computer and then think about what you want to be at the end of day. Do you want to be a writer or not? If you do, you need to make time, not excuses.

Retirement

I've been thinking more and more about my previous post about "writer or not?", mainly because one of our contract staff (there were only four of us) resigned a few weeks ago, to write, and earlier this week we four met to talk writing, teaching and what she's going to do. She's doing a Masters as well as working on various projects. I think resigning from paid employment is a terribly courageous move. Sometimes new and enthusiastic writers do it, envisioning fame and fortune just around the corner. That's more of a naive move, and they're usually back at work in six months time. But for those of us who've been around awhile, there are no such delusions (though of course we wouldn't complain if they happened our way). So it is an act of courage, an act of faith -- a decision that isn't made lightly but after careful weighing up of finances and realistic expectations.

When I first fell pregnant, people would say to me, "What are you going to do in all your spare time?" These were people without children. And with a glimmer of the excitement I felt, I would tell them I was going to write. I was writing anyway. I fitted it into the late nights after my husband went to bed. In my mind, the baby would sleep all day, and, oh joy, I would be free to write! Little did I picture a baby who never slept in the daytime and countless hours trying to pacify her.

Time like that didn't come until my two children were at school. I had one year of it, where I wrote large screes -- but my husband became unemployed, and I was forced back to work. Don't get me wrong: I love teaching. It was a stretch at first, but I really love it. I enjoy the whole university push to get us out and being entrepeneurs a whole lot less, but that's another story. I love seeing the creative fire in my student's eyes and knowing that I'm helping build their skills towards realising their own dreams, and I find that my writing is often consigned again to those late night shifts. But I will take it where I can get it. Sometimes, I think, the pressure of a deadline is more motivating than unlimited time to make me put my bum on seat. Unlimitless time requires discipline -- but then this always has been the writer's most important commodity. Not time, not skill or talent or anything else, but discipline.

The perennial problem of time

Yesterday, I had my first classes back after the long midsemester break, and I asked my students to start with a discussion on how their novels are going. In that discussion, I said each person had to tell me one thing they were finding problematic and one they were finding exciting about writing their novels. As we went around the class, several listed their problem as finding time to write. Now, the midsemester break, with no classes and almost no homework, might seem the perfect time to build a decent tally on their weekly word counts, but it had quite the opposite effect. All sorts of things had got in their way: work (doing a lot more hours), illness, other commitments.

In the end, we all have to make choices about our writing. We have to prioritise. For some people, writing is always their top priority. These people will sacrifice everything for their art. (This isn't unique to writing, of course. I remember reading an interview with Bill Cosby where he talked about what he had sacrificed for his acting, including his family life, and how he regretted having been so selfish. It was a brutally honest, poignant interview.) At the other extreme are the people who say they want to write but never have any time at all, and talk about one day... One day, of course, will never come. Most of us lie somewhere on the continuum between these two poles.

There is no right way to live a life. Nobody can tell you that you must make writing a priority, and which priority that must be. Does it come before family? Does it come before work commitments? Does it come before a friend in real need? Or a friend who wants you along for a good time? Does it come before TV and computer games? Only you can decide. But what if you are serious about your work, committed to finishing a novel, but never able to find time? Then you need to examine where you're going wrong.

Here's my thoughts on how to better manage time. First of all, decide where your priorities do lie. Think about how you spend your time nowand where you want to be when you climb into bed. Will you be happy to have written another 1,000 words or frustrated that again you had no time to write? Here are some practical solutions on how to deal with time-wasting activities. A weekly schedule can be invaluable in helping you squirrel time away.

1. Television. How much easier it is to sit and veg in front of the TV than boot up the computer and work on your novel. Write down a list of everything you watch during the week. Be honest. If you were going out each night, which ones would you ask someone to tape and which ones would you miss? Any that you wouldn't bother taping are ones that you can cut from your schedule. Chalk in that time as writing time.

2. Friends who want you to go out when you want to write. How much time do you spend socialising a week? Learn to say no. You don't have to be so blunt. A "sorry, I can't" will work just as well. You could perhaps set part of a particular day away each week and let your friends know that's when you'll be available. It's all a matter of balance -- but one you'll have to think about if you're not taking time to write.

3. Computer games. These are so easy to slip into, but before you know it you've lost an hour, several hours, a whole day. A few years ago, I fell in love with The Sims, and made the fatal mistake of turning my characters into Sims. How much fun that was, playing with these people I already loved. Whether it's Solitaire or something more sophisticated, you're just going to have to be really strict with yourself. If you like to play each day, limit yourself for a set number of games if they're quick or a set amount of time and adhere to this. Again, think about the end of the day and what you want to have achieved.

4. Emails and blogs. It's easy to kid yourself that these are essentially not time wasters -- after all, you're on a list that keeps you up to date with new publishing opportunities. But how much time do you spend reading and/or writing congratulatory notes because Betty has just placed a short story in an ezine? Learn to skim the entries and don't read every email. Write your blog after you've written your 1000 words.

5. Telephone. Don't ring in your writing time, and unless you've got ill people in the family/small children at school, let the answering machine take the call. You can always call back later.

6. Family not respecting boundaries. Talk to them about how serious this is. If you're home when they're not, do your writing then. Leave housework, shopping, food preparation etc for when they're home. Leave your blog and emails till when they're home. Exploit your quiet time for writing.

7. Research. Essential, yes, but there's a time to research and a time to write. You can use the McKenna method of writing where you add a parenthesis and write "insert details here", and come back to it later. Research is great, and it informs your writing, and often all the sidetracks you pursue can be as rewarding as the informating you're hunting down, but if all you ever do is research, you're not going to get that novel written. Decide when enough is enough, and realise you can get the other stuff later. Never interrupt the flow of writing to look something up.

8. Lack of discipline masquerading as being too busy. Bum on seat. Sign a writing contract with yourself: a set number of words per day, or a set amount of time. Do not leave your seat until those words/that time is done. Find someone you can be accountable to, and send them regular reports on how you're going.

9. Disorganisation: letting time just slip away. Use your writing contract. Use a timetable. Try blocking out what you do for one day, and just finding out where that time really is going.

10. Fear. This is a difficult one and warrants a post all of its own. Writers are afraid of lots of things. You have to sit through the fear. No-one said writing is easy. It's not. But you want to be a writer, right? Bum on seat. Allow yourself the freedom of writing crap. Remember, the bottom line is that crappy pages can be edited into something better; blank pages cannot.

Writer or not?

The last few days I've been doing some work at home (inbetween editing my novel), listening to some podcasts we're producing to get an online unit up and running. Yesterday, I was finishing off one I'd started earlier, which was a recording of an editor from an independent publishing house, talking about the publishing process. Among the many things she talked about was a decision she says that every writer must make: whether they want to be a writer and make that the focus of everything, or whether they want to do other things and write books around (or about) these.

It's an interesting topic when you consider the great divide between those who write full-time, and those who support their writing with working full- or part-time. This second group are often not people who want to do other things and write, but writers who want to write full-time but cannot support their basic existence by writing alone. There's a big YET that comes after that sentence. Maybe this is a situation peculiar to those of us living in countries with smaller populations, but I suspect not. After all, every country will have their emerging writers; it's just that here in Australia, most of our established writers cannot live by writing alone. That's the difference.

There are also those who write for the sheer joy of writing and have no intention of getting published. I consider them -- if they are still serious about honing their craft, and many of them are -- every bit as much real writers. (And I know the editor wasn't suggesting that one group was more or less important than the other, just that they have different focuses -- or foci, if you'd rather.) I had an argument with one of my Sydney friends last time I was up there about this. She suggested that every writer wants to be published. I don't support this view at all. And when I was at Buninyong the other day, I was interested to hear Peter Bishop talk about this: how some writers, well on the path to publication, suddenly decide, for whatever reason, that it's a path they don't want to continue on.

In opposition are those who write to be rich or famous. They're usually new to writing. Even as a beginner, I don't think my glasses were ever this rosy. I always wonder how long disillusionment will take to set in, and whether it will stop them from writing. If they're real writers, it won't. And as a counterpoint are those published writers who talk about never having had a rejection, but they are few and far between. Most of us suffer rejection at some time in our writing careers, especially at the beginning.

But the whole idea of a writer being someone whose full-time focus is on writing is disconcerting. I do want to be a writer; I do want to write full-time. But does this mean I have to give up teaching? My students often inspire me. I feel privileged to read their work and take part in their journey.

Teaching writing means my working week is still spent thinking about writing -- looking through writing books for new ways of approaching things, for different answers to the same or different problems, for new ways of inspiring students (and myself in the process). Teaching writing is a paradox -- on the one hand it informs my writing, but on the other it saps my creative strength, as I put a lot into my students. At Clarion, I asked every tutor who had taught writing how they wrote and taught, and they all said that you can't do both. But can't you? Other writing teachers do it. But do they do it as much as they should or could? One of our teachers has just resigned after ten years teaching so she can spend more time writing. It is a conundrum. If I had the kind of advance that meant I could consider leaving teaching, would I do it? Truth is I don't know. In the meantime, I'll just do what most writers do: work and squeeze every moment I can out of my day for my great passion: writing or, more specifically, my current novel.

Finding time

It's been a frustrating few weeks in terms of writing: student assignments to mark, tests to write. But that all finished on Tuesday night when I finished my twelve-hour stint at work. Wednesday mornings are always a wasteland, and this week was worse than usual because I've come down with a dreaded lurgy. A head cold. Bleuck. I don't mind chest colds when I bark and bark, but a head cold with sinus pain... Bleuck.

Anyway, we had no writer's group meeting, and I was all set to do a final proof on Poetrix, and write up the contents page, and then sit down to write when the phone went. Princess Sleepyhead was sick and could I please come to school to pick her up. Now, admittedly, she had been sick since Monday night, but as they were doing AIMS tests at school (statewide Maths and Literacy tests that students do in Years 3, 5, 7 & 9) she had to go to school. The way AIMS tests work are you either do them on the day, or you don't. There's no-come-back-later-when-you're-feeling-better-and-do-it-then contingency. It's do or die. And she had to do. Much to her disgust.

So, by this time I was feeling worse: she went to bed, and so did I. So she was home all day Thursday. I sat down to write several times, but things cropped up. She needed something. The phone rang. And rang again. And again. I gritted my teeth. Because I hadn't written for several days, I had come out of the story, and all I needed was some time to reimmerse myself, to sink back into its depths. In the end I made a start and wrote about 500 words, which I consider a very poor day's work, when I'm writing. I tried to console myself that today was the day. She had a special day on at school, where they were going rock-climbing, and I would have the house to myself. Wrong.

Today, the Gadget Man, also struck down with it, stayed home. Princess Sleepyhead's school rang at 1 pm to come get her, and then Sir Talkalot rang to say he wasn't feeling well and wouldn't be able to make the bus home so could I please come and get him? Double growl. So instead of being home alone with all day to write, I was up and down to schools, with three sickies home (and me not much better). But, and this is a big BUT, I did manage to squeeze out over 2,500 words, so am feeling a bit less frustrated. But the weekend will be a write-off, what with Mother's Day and all. (Means driving all over the place.) And I have to work Monday, which I don't usually have to do. But I will squeeze in some more words -- here and there in the spaces between events, between shopping and taxiing and doing all the things I have to do. Because that's how it is for most of us who don't write full-time. There's no great slab of hours, just small moments. But filling these with words will pick away at that total. Writers write. We do it when we can, as best we can, because that's what we do.