Prioritize Your Writing
I am humbled to be a Guest of Honor at Bouchercon 2024 this week. So, in honor of all the wonderful authors I am meeting this weekend, I’ll share with you the common questions I’m getting from writers as I appear on panels, walk the halls, and generally interact with everyone here.
Here are some questions along the same general theme: Ever get frustrated because you don’t get to write? Do you feel agitated? Do you feel frustrated? Do you even feel depressed?
Yes, I’ve been there. I’ve felt all those things. It's a shared struggle among us writers that life often gets in the way of our writing. Life doesn’t always recognize the importance of writing to our ultimate goals and self-expression. But there’s a solution. We must take control of our lives.
Easier said than done, right?
Let’s be honest: If we let them, our lives, for the most part, are train wrecks. Too much is demanded of us. There is never enough time between work, family, social activities, and other obligations. We don’t have enough time to do the things that are important while we are awake. We don’t have enough time to get a good night’s sleep. When we try to sleep, we can’t stop thinking about everything we need to do. Sadly, most of those things we are thinking about have little to do with writing. We are overloaded. No wonder we cannot write. We are allowing the world and ourselves to stress ourselves out.
Stress is not helpful to quality writing. It interferes with the flow. But the inspiring truth is that we don’t need to be stressed. We cannot write our best when we are stressed. But we can let that stress go and thus increase the flow that will produce our best writing. Compartmentalization is the key. It's the practice of mentally separating different aspects of your life, such as work, family, and writing, so that you can focus on one at a time. We’ve got to compartmentalize our lives, set priorities, get rid of the stress, and make time to write, making it one of our highest priorities.
We all deal with stress, whether it's from external sources or our own expectations. But it's important to remember that stress is stress, and it can hinder our productivity, effectiveness, and creativity. You're not alone in this.
Most writers must have day jobs. That’s just the way it is. My day job is not only writing but also running an entertainment company. It isn’t easy to have a day job and write. I know. The experts know, as well. In a survey conducted by the University of Western Ontario and the Sprott School of Business at Carleton University when they surveyed 25,000 full-time employees, half said they took their work home with them at night (who can write when you have that), fifty-seven percent reported having high levels of stress (I was surprised the number on this one was so low), and a third felt they carried more work than they had time to complete (and don’t we all feel that). But your book still needs to be written if this is the path we want to follow to reach our dreams.
We’ll discuss solutions for this later, and I’ll share how I have found a work/life balance with you. For today, I’d like you to do two things. I love lists, so I want you to make two lists.
List everything you do in your day that keeps you from writing. I haven’t seen your list, but if you are serious, put the number 1 beside your writing. That is something that you must make time for each day. Now, look at that list and see if you are concentrating on the wrong things, such as excessive social media use, unnecessary chores, or over-commitment to social activities. Cross those things out. Put them on the back burner. Plan to do them later when you have time, not when you take time away from your writing. Look at the things you must do and prioritize them after your writing. Ensure your writing stays in the first place and your daily writing gets done. Don’t try to add more hours to your day. That won’t work for all the obvious reasons. Prioritize and eliminate. Those are the keys. Do that today. Start thinking about how you’ve let your life be structured and how you might instead like to see it structured, and then we’ll get back to more thoughts on this in a future blog.
The key is to create a stress-free environment for your writing every day. Together, we can make that happen. You have the power to make it happen, but it requires a choice and the courage to prioritize your writing.
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