Nicole Adel Rivens

Or rather… it is continuing from [part 1]

How Am I Supposed To Do This?

If I am in a bathtub, adrift on the ocean, heading for some type of harbour on the other side, what do I have at my disposal to help me cross? What tools do I have? What methods can I practice?

Rather than going in to a long discussion about craft – adverbs, dialogue tags, info dumping – I would like to mention a tool I actually needed to get rid of first before I could make any significant progress. It has nothing to do with writing style, grammar, plotting versus pantsing, yada yada…

The tool I HAD to force out of my bathtub, because it was doing me no good, was the regular 9-to-5 daily routine. Writing is not like any other job I’ve had. There is no check-in, check-out time. I am my own boss and my own worst nightmare. I can sleep until noon, or I can bully myself into get up at 7am. Sadly, I tend lean more towards the latter. How I wish I could have been easier on myself from the outset, embrace the job and just sleep in!

I have always been my own worst bully – a journey I hope to write about some day – so even though the guardrails of a steady 9-to-5 job were removed by switching to self-employment, I still felt I had to enforce this structure upon my daily routine. As I have hobbled through five months of this, facing burnout at every turn, I now realize that I was refusing to lean into one of the great benefits that come with a full-time fiction writing job.

Being full-time means I can make my own schedule (of course). No one is checking in on me, making sure I’m clocking in everyday. Nor can anyone enforce a societal norm of what a “real job” is supposed to look like in this field. No one knows how to do it. Even writers comparing notes, can’t really pin down a cohesive strategy for how they get the job done. But the factor all successful writers have in common is they have at least pinned down the strategies that work for them, individually.

Brandon Sanderson was the one writer who blew my daily working model completely out of the water (pun intended).

“I usually get up at noon or 1:00 and write from 1:00 until 5:00, a four-hour chunk. At 5:00 I stop, and 5:00 until 10:00 is family time for me… And then I go back to work at 10:00 after everybody goes to bed, theoretically (children are children). And I write from 10:00 until 2:00, and then 2:00 until 4:00 is goof-off time for me.” –Brandon Sanderson, “My Work Life Balance As A Writer” a transcription of a live lecture, posted at https://www.brandonsanderson.com/blogs/blog/my-work-life-balance-as-a-writer

Go ahead, call me crazy! This epiphany has blown my mind for weeks: I can write whenever the hell I want! I can be starting my writing work at 10pm, while everyone is heading to bed and the world around me is (fairly) silent. I can end my working day on a significant high; punching out my daily writing task, whether it be a word count or a chapter revision. Breaking out of the 9-to-5 monotony has opened the door to creating a BRAND NEW schedule; one that works for me and keeps me from burning out.

[continued in part 3]