March 19, 2010

Getting into the writing habit is difficult, especially in the early years of writing. Our lives are full to overflowing already, so where can we possibly fit in some writing? How can we form a consistent writing habit when our schedules change from day to day, depending on our obligations?

Believe it or not, you have more time to write than you think. Keep a time log, tracking how you spend your time for a few days or a week. If you do, you’ll spot “down” time that you use for other things which could be snagged for your writing.

Redirect Your Time

When my kids were very young, I desperately wanted to write. I realized that instead of catching up on laundry and chores during their afternoon naps, I could write. Instead of making beds and doing dishes during the morning half hour of “Mr. Rogers,” I could write. Instead of thumbing through ragged magazines for twenty minutes every Friday afternoon while my daughter got her allergy shots, I could write.

Bed making and dishes and laundry could be done while little ones milled around. I chose to write instead when they didn’t need me. That “nap-Mr. Rogers-allergy shot” schedule became my writing routine until my youngest went to kindergarten. By that time, Atheneum had published my first five middle grade novels.

Hidden Time

“But I really don’t have any free time!” you might truly think. I challenge you to study your schedule very closely. Everyone has pockets of “down” time during the day. It may vary from day to day, but usually it is consistent weekly. (For example, you may sit in the pick-up line at your daughter’s elementary school every afternoon for fifteen minutes. Instead of listening to the radio, write.)

You might free up some time by doubling up on your mindless activities. Most of us multi-tasked before the word became popular, but if you’re not, try it. While supper is cooking, don’t watch the news; pay those bills or wrap those birthday gifts, and free up a half hour in the evening to write. If you want to write YA novels, listen to those young adult books on tape while you walk your dog. You’ll be doing your “market research” for an hour, freeing up an hour later to write.

Get It in Writing

Write down whatever pockets of time that you discover can be used for your writing. Even if it’s only fifteen-minute chunks, note them. You can write an amazing amount in ten or fifteen minutes at a time-and it adds up. You may find these chunks in the “between times.” You might have a bit of time between when the kids get on the school bus and you have to leave for work. Or between your day job and supper, you may have half an hour that you wait on a child at ball practice. (I wrote a lot sitting in bleachers waiting for children at practice.)

Write all these pockets of time down on a weekly schedule and write it on your daily calendar. Make it a habit. Perhaps on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, you write half an hour before work, plus daily you write fifteen minutes before cooking supper, and Saturday morning you write an hour while the kids watch cartoons. That’s four hours of writing in a week, just in the free bits and pieces. Since many of us started writing while caring for small children and/or holding down a day job, this kind of weekly schedule may be the best you can do for a while.

And that’s fine!

Time-Honored Tradition

The highest percentage of today’s famous, best-selling authors admit that their writing schedules were exactly like this in the early years. But they had that “burning desire to write” too. And that desire is what motivates us to find those pockets of time, give them to our writing, schedule it daily, and follow through.

You can find time to write, whether it’s early morning, during your noon hour, late at night, during commutes, or in catch-as-catch-can bits throughout the day. You must integrate writing into your existing routine for it to work.

Schedules make writing a habit, which in turn makes it a permanent part of your lifestyle.

March 30, 2009

After mentioning a five-year dry publishing period last week (Do You Get Rejected?), I received several emails asking what I did during that time to stay financially afloat and keep on writing.

A Previous Recession

When my book career began in the 80′s, I had five or six relatively easy years with my editor Gail at Atheneum. We did eleven hardcovers together before Gail lost her job in a corporate take-over and downsizing. The publishing industry then was a lot like it is today.

At that time, I got two manuscripts back. Within six months, all my books went out of print– so there was almost no royalty income then. My last two books in a Christian series were not published either. (I found out much later that this happened to a lot of writers.) This horror was followed by five years of no new books, sending out proposals, rewriting proposals, writing queries, and spending a ton on postage and photocopying costs when I was making zilch on my book writing. (There was no online writing then, no email submissions, etc.)

Getting Out of the Slump

Then in a bookstore I found a book called Making It On Your Own: Surviving and Thriving on the Ups and Downs of Being Your Own Boss by Paul and Sarah Edwards. In the marketing section, a statement leaped off the page. This one piece of advice jump-started my disappearing career. “You need to experiment until you discover what particular combination of your skills and abilities at what price will be valuable to what group of people within the current economic realities.”

It said to experiment, so I tried different things to see what might work. The following year I wrote a story for an anthology, entered several contests, did some short manuscripts for children’s magazines, wrote some writers’ articles. I created a new workshop on revision and did eighteen months’ of school visits with it.

Time to Evaluate

The next step recommended by the book was  to use the 80/20 Principle on your experiments. So I sat down with paper and pencil and analyzed: “What 20% of my work has generated 80% of my income?” In other words, what strategies had worked for me? Where should I be putting the bulk of my energy to survive this financial writing slump?

Well, I had bombed on contests and all fifteen short stories; I did sell the story to the anthology; my fastest response and most money, though, came from writing articles for magazines and doing the revision workshop. More than 80% of my income was coming from that 20% of my work.  So (while I contintued to write my middle-grade fiction novels) I concentrated on those two things to pay the bills.

Down the Road…

During that time, some nonfiction articles became a series for Children’s Writer, which turned into ideas for “Support Room” articles when I became the Institute‘s first web editor. A few years later, those ideas sparked my book, Writer’s First Aid, as well as several articles for the SCBWI Bulletin.

The slump eventually ended, as it will again for writers struggling in the current recession. After five years of selling no books, I sold four of my middle-grade novels in one year. If I had quit writing my fiction during that recession, I would have had nothing to sell when publishers started buying again.

So during this slump, I plan to do the same thing: find ways to stay afloat to pay some bills, but also keep writing middle-grade fiction and studying and learning. This too shall pass.