I’ve never been good at organising or scheduling myself and when it comes to writing my time has never been especially well planned. I have too many projects on the go at any one time and often no plan on how to tackle any of it. So I end up doing too much at the same time and achieving relatively little.
If something doesn’t come naturally to you, but you need to do it, you need to find ways of implementing it. You need mechanisms that make up for your deficiencies. I work hard, that comes naturally, but, if left to my own meandering devices, I don’t work efficiently. And if time is short – and it always is – then you need efficiency. I trained a kind of orderliness into myself for my day job because it was absolutely essential, but it did not come naturally, or easily. So I’m trying out a boring little schedule for my writing to see if I can improve how much I can get done. It tells me what to do so that on any given evening I can just sit down and get on with it.
Be regular and ordinary in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. Gustave Flaubert
And so my new writing schedule looks like this. Monday, submissions. Tuesday, fiction. Wednesday, blog. Thursday, fiction. Friday, nothing. Weekend, fiction.
Doing nothing on Fridays isn’t new. My average Friday is get home, eat dinner and then watch YouTube until I fall asleep. It’s just that in the past I would have felt guilty about it. Now it’s scheduled, so I’m fine. My wife helped to come up with the schedule and having a day where I deliberately don’t do anything is all down to her It’s a good idea – even a necessary one – and I never would have come up with it myself.
And having a whole evening set aside for submissions is essential at the moment because I am submitting a lot. Submitting work to places can be a lot more time consuming than it seems, if you take care with what you are doing, and I think you should. But researching publications, reading what they have already published, formatting your manuscript to meet their requirements, writing the cover letter, checking everything so you can be confidant in what you have done, all of that takes time. I spent this Monday doing submissions as this is the first week I am trying this schedule out and in the time I had available I was able to do three. Even though it would have been good to do more, in the past that would have spiralled out and eaten multiple evenings that really ought to be spent writing. Browsing the statistics on duotrope is one of those compulsive things can really get out of hand. But Monday is done, three is how many I did, I’ll do more next week.
This blog was something else that tended to get a bit lost. I’m not entirely what sure this blog is about exactly, other than me just blathering on about the booky stuff in my life, but I knew I wanted it to at least be regular, and reasonably frequent. It didn’t used to be. I used to manage about one post every two months. So I tricked myself into writing a blog post every week by declaring on the front page that that’s what I would do. It worked too. Aside from a couple of weeks ago when I was away on holiday I managed to do one post a week, for what that was worth.
But of course the real purpose of all this is to create the space to finish the fiction I start, and we’ll see how that goes. The truth is I never know how much time I am going to get in an evening. Sometimes it’s hardly any, and sometimes even if I have a lot I still don’t get much done. Sometimes writing works and sometimes it doesn’t and scheduling it doesn’t make the words come any better. But the space is there waiting for it.
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life. Lawrence Kasdan
You never really switch off from being a writer. I carry a notebook everywhere I go and I’m constantly grabbing it to get something down quickly. Mostly it is full of sentences that come to me while I’m doing something else. I don’t tend to write ideas down, but I have to snatch at the sentences before I lose them. If I forget an idea that I thought sounded good I assume it can’t have been that good at all. But if I lose sentence, that stings. This week I wrote the same sentence down four times throughout the day, all phrased every so slightly differently. Getting it just right is delicate work, but when it flits through your head you have to grab it. So it’s not like I won’t do anything until my scheduled writing evenings, but that’s when I can get some serious work done. That’s the bit of my week that is for nothing else but writing.
toby wallis 