Year of Fearless Writing – Time Confetti

Welcome to the Year of Fearless Writing!

Bits and pieces

As I write this, I am working around laundry, dishes, paperwork, a quick trip to the store, a note from my kid’s teacher, and—somehow—my own novel. It’s staggering, how quickly the day fills up, even when my only “real job” is “mom,” and I find myself looking resentfully at the computer as though my book could write itself, if only I had the time.

The thing is, I might have the time. I made the first novel work around not only this job but a full-time day job and commute. And I think I’ve learned some great lessons from two very different sources: National Novel Writing Month and our own microprose grid.

So how exactly can we take advantage of the time we have? And how do we make the time we don’t have?

The myth

How many of us have said, “I don’t have time to write”? (You can’t see it, but I’m raising my own hand here.) Writing takes time, and lots of it. We need peace and quiet, or the perfect soundtrack. We need space around us—physical and emotional—so that we can focus on our work. We need hours without interruptions. Once we get started, we need to keep going until we’ve exhausted our words, our emotions, and (very possibly) our spouses, families, and friends.

Right?

Maybe not, depending on who you are and what you’re doing.

The reality

It turns out we might have more time than we think we do, it’s just packed in and around all of the other things. Author Brigid Schulte calls these scattered minutes and hours “time confetti.” Schulte notes that this scattering of time is more pronounced for women or other primary caretakers of households, as opposed to people who have the option to work a day job that actually stops at a specified time and don’t have additional tasks to complete afterward (or a second job!).

So what does the free time in time confetti look like? It’s the time we spend between tasks. We wait in lines, we wait for the bus, we wait for doctor’s appointments. There’s that seven minutes when you’re waiting for the dryer, which was supposed to be done and isn’t. There’s the half-hour between that one phone call and your kids walking in the door after school. All these bits and pieces of time scattered through your day.

What can a person get done in seven minutes? Well, it depends. You can write a sentence, maybe even two or three, on a short project. It doesn’t sound like much, but they can add up, and before you know it, you’ve hit your 1,667 words for NaNoWriMo or finished that short-form essay or microfiction story.

The caveat

It’s possible to squeeze some kinds of writing into five minutes here, ten minutes there, depending on who you are. Editing, however, is a different beast, and requires a different approach. Editing requires you to look at a project holistically, and it takes solid blocks of time to review and move forward with your work. Trying to fit editing into tiny chunks of time can result in a disjointed final product. And if you’re working on a long project, you may not be able to do more in ten minutes than remember where you left off writing the last time, which means you haven’t moved forward at all. Still, there are things you can do in five or ten minutes that will help, and we’ll talk about them in this post.

Tape your confetti together

So how do you get your scattered time back, and make it into productive time? There are two ways to do it:

• Find blocks of time. Maybe you can run several errands at the same time, or ask your spouse, partner, or roommate to pick something up on their way home instead of always being the only one who shops. Maybe you can declare certain time to be “your time” like while the kids are doing homework (unless you need to help, obviously) or while the rest of the family watches a show after dinner. Maybe something that you habitually do can move to someone else’s chore list. Or maybe you can be a little more diligent about getting the things you need to do done first thing, instead of checking Facebook for the 50th time. However you do it, you’ll need to find longer chunks of time to write and edit in, so start practicing now.
• Find things that work for you in tiny pieces of time. I can’t write even a paragraph in ten minutes, but I can jot down some notes describing what I need to get out of a scene. I can’t write dialogue in five minutes waiting for my bus, but I can spend the time looking up cool names on baby name sites so that I don’t waste the bigger pieces of time I have doing that. I may not be able to write, but I can re-read what I’ve written and start thinking about what comes next. And I can practice pitching – or just talking about – my projects. Check my submissions spreadsheet. Read and edit my author bio. Or come up with a really REALLY great zinger that I want my character to get to say at some point (don’t be me: write this one down).

Once you know what you can and can’t accomplish with each type of time, it’s time to adjust your workflow to match.

Treat your writing like a job

When you’re being paid to get stuff done, it’s easy to justify taking the time to do it. You squeeze in phone calls and emails between meetings or shifts, if you have to, or over lunch breaks. (No, but really, don’t work over your lunch break—unless you’re taking advantage of the break from your day job to switch to your writing job. And even then, remember to stretch, take a walk, snd drink some water before sitting down.) Unless you’re a full-time writer, you’ll need to work around other obligations, but that doesn’t mean writing isn’t important, too.

Neil Gaiman has said that the way to be a writer is… “just write.” Which is great advice if you’re Neil Gaiman. But you’re probably not. So here’s a look at what Neil Gaiman’s assistants do so that he doesn’t have to. Look at that list. Sound familiar? Gaiman’s assistants take care of all the things that would otherwise be chopping his time into confetti, don’t they? Remember the 30 hours a week of useless confetti that Schulte had? Gaiman gets to take those 30 hours in a productive chunk, and he doesn’t have to run the errands. So when you get advice like “make writing a priority” or “just write” – even from us – please do take it with a grain of salt. Think about who’s talking and what their life is like. It’s fine to have other priorities that take precedence over your writing. That doesn’t mean that writing isn’t a priority for you, it means you don’t have assistants.

THAT SAID:

Maybe writing isn’t your full-time job, but it’s just as important as anything else you’re doing, even if it’s a little harder to justify when writing isn’t paying the bills (yet). Put it on your calendar; protect what time you can. Take it seriously, even if writing is just a hobby or a way to blow off steam. Self-care is important, too!

Strategies and tactics

It’s easy to say “use the time you have well,” but how do you actually do it? Your actual approach will be unique to you, but here are some ideas.

General practices:

• Make your goals attainable. Write one sentence. If you have time, write another. Eventually these will add up! If you can’t write a lengthy story or essay this way (most people can’t), write short poetry or microfiction to stay in practice for when you do have the time for longer work.
• Use small blocks of time for writing-related activities: Social media posts, emails, reviews, researching submission opportunities—sometimes activities that support your writing practice are easier to fit into a small block of time than actual writing. Do set some boundaries for yourself: it’s easy to find yourself drifting down a rabbit hole of zeppelin plans when you’re supposed to be writing a fight scene. (Ask me how I know.)
• Talk to your partner (or family, or friends). Make a plan. Let them know that this time is important to you, and that it’s a priority. They have activities, too- you’ll all need to work together and support each other. I know these conversations can feel hard and scary but they pay off in the long run, and you’ll feel less resentful.
• Focus. This sounds like a no-brainer, but when you’re writing, especially if you only have a short time to do it, make sure your focus is completely on your work. Shut out the couple having a conversation next to you at the bus stop; ignore the dirty dishes in the sink. Don’t sit next to the stack of bills you have to pay and mentally sort them. Go somewhere else if you need to. For this brief time, your words are your number one priority. (Bonus: it’s often easier to do this for short periods of time than long ones!)

When you’re out and about:

• Carry a notebook. Yes, a plain old physical notebook. You never know when or where you’ll get an idea.
• Use technology. Try the Notes app on your phone, or a cloud-based service such as Evernote or Google Docs to keep your words right at your fingertips. Maybe you can even dictate your story into your phone while you’re walking the dog. Or use that time to do research or call (or text, which also provides you with handy notes to use later) a friend to talk through a sticky scene.
• Can’t write? Think. Sometimes you just can’t safely or comfortably get to your phone or notebook. Maybe you commute by bike, or maybe your phone battery is low. Take a breath, tune out everything else, and write a sentence or two in your head. You can jot them down later. Or work out how that scene should go.

When you’re home:

• Set a timer. Write for a short, specified amount of time (say, 20 minutes) before moving on to a different task. Set a timer for that one, and then come back to writing. The key here is to stop when the timer goes off. Don’t keep writing even if you’re “on a roll.” This way you’ll have a place to pick up again, and it will hopefully be enough to get the wheels spinning again, instead of starting from a complete stop. Bonus: It’s easier to get your family to leave you alone for a specified amount of time than “while I’m writing.”
• Use writing as a reward. Did you finish the laundry? Give yourself twenty minutes to write. Did you vacuum the living room? Give yourself thirty. It’s the same principle as above, but task-oriented instead of time-oriented. Bonus: using free time as a reward keeps you from using it to procrastinate. You have enough confetti in your day; don’t make more when you don’t have to!

These strategies sound easy, maybe, but keep in mind that some chunks of time are simply too small to use. If you have 2 hours broken into 10 minute chunks, you can’t write a novel like that. Figure out what the smallest meaningful amount of time is for you, and use that when you can. Don’t beat yourself up for not being able to squeeze every single minute out of every single day.

Synchronize your watches

Now that you know where all your time is going (and hopefully how to get some of it back), you’ll need to decide how to use it. Consider making a list of tasks you can accomplish in ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, and longer than an hour. Then when you have time on your hands, you don’t spend it deciding what to do, you can just… do.

Your homework for this month:

See how much (if anything) you can write in ten minutes. What did you learn about your workflow as a writer? Do you need more time than that? Identify at least one “minimum” length of time in your week that you could use to write or do a writing-related activity, and commit to doing that weekly.

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