Thoughts on Writing #26: Hermitage.: seanan

Thoughts on Writing #26: Hermitage.

It's time for the twenty-sixth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. We're more than halfway to the end of the series now, since all these essays are based around my fifty thoughts on writing. Thanks to everyone who's been reading, discussing, and generally making this a fascinating process. I've learned a great deal, both from sitting here scratching my head as I look for things to say and from reading the things that people say to me in return. The remaining essays will be touching on a great many more aspects of the art of writing, and will probably double back on themselves more than a few times. That's the business.

Thoughts on Writing #26: Hermitage.

It sounds like a simple notion, doesn't it? But the fact of the matter is, hermitage is a big, complicated thing that we often fail to give sufficient attention or consideration. Bearing that in mind, here's today's expanded topic:

Learn to be a hermit. Learn to say 'I'm sorry, but I can't come to your party, I booked that night for revisions and I don't have any other time to do it this week.' Learn to tell people no. Learn to treat writing as a job -- one that may well be both unpaid and in addition to whatever job pays the bills for a long, long time. If you make excuses to let yourself skip writing, if you choose a social life over that second job, you're not addicted enough. If you want to get better, you'll learn.

As anyone who's ever tried to sit down for a block of scheduled writing -- from the wealthiest novelist to the kid who just needs to finish that book report -- can tell you, most people don't view 'writing' as being the same as 'real work.' Even the people who've heard me explain exactly how many hours I need to complete a novel frequently have trouble understanding that those necessary hours will sometimes conflict with their proposed dinner plans. And here's the thing: nobody tells a doctor not to practice medicine, or tries to talk him out of reading that book on brain surgery because they'd rather be playing checkers. But as a writer, you'll get it all the time.

So how do you cope? How do you strike a balance, and how do you do it without losing all your friends? Let's begin.

Facts of Life.

Fact: Writing, like any activity, takes time. Everything takes time. Sleeping, eating, walking to the 7-11 for a soda the size of your head, these things all take time. A thing does not actually have to have any redeeming value to take time. A thing does not need to have any value that can be seen by the people who don't live inside your head, either. Things will take time, whether you want them to or not, and at the end of the day, we just get to figure out where we want our time to be spent.

Fact: Everyone has their own system of judgments and values, which applies when attempting to gauge the value of time. I spent a lovely ninety minutes or so not that long ago doing nothing but working on art cards. Coloring art cards. Inking art cards. Attempting to do really subtle color blending with rapidly drying markers, on art cards. There are people -- some of whom I respect greatly and love dearly -- who would say this time was wasted; that if I had ninety minutes to spend, I should have spent it on writing. There are others who will say that heck, I should've put on something nice and gone out for a cocktail. We all rate according to our own scale. At the end of the day, no one gets to rate your time but you.

Fact: Our time is not our own. Our time is never our own. When we're kids, our time is controlled at least in part by our parents, by schooldays and bedtimes and the social structure of our peers. There are things we can make choices about, but we'll never have total freedom. Even as adults, while we may have the power to decide that it's ice cream for breakfast day, we can't decide not to waste time on sleeping, eating, working...the list goes on. The loneliest, most isolated person in the entire universe still doesn't have absolute control over his or her time.

Fact: Most writers -- even successful, established writers, writers with half a dozen novels under their belts and a thousand short stories to their names -- will not be able to make their living purely on the written word. If it happens at all, it will most likely happen after years of work, and it may not last forever. All those liens on your time are there to stay. Learning how to live with them is going to make your life a lot easier.

Fact: All work and no play really does make Jack a dull boy. If you put your head down and refuse to come up for water ever ever ever amen, you're eventually going to burn yourself out. This is also a time-management issue, because barring unexpected deadlines and things going boom, you should always have the space to build a little slack into your schedule. Slack takes time, too. Just like everything else.

Learning About Time.

Most of us learned what would become our default time management tactics while we were still in grade school. You have your diligent students, you have your last-minute study hall crammers, and you have everything in the middle. (We're leaving the people who didn't do their homework out of this little metaphor. Their editors will deal with them in detention.) For the average person, patterns become habit in about three weeks. Well, we went to school for anywhere from fifteen to twenty-four years. That's a lot of pattern-forming.

The trouble is really the fact that, when you're in school, people automatically give you time to do your homework. Hell, people make you sit down and do your homework. We all had those jam-packed weekends where we totally forgot about that book report until ten minutes before the bell on Monday morning, but on the whole, we were encouraged to do what needed to be done in a timely fashion. Sometimes we were encouraged with sticks. When we turned our homework in late (or not at all), there were immediate and absolutely understandable consequences, pretty much regardless of the reasons for the delay. So we learned that we needed to do our work, and we learned that the world would always give us space for that work to happen.

Sadly, once you graduate from high school, this is no longer the case. Oh, many people stay in school for several more years, but very few parents call their college-age children specifically to ask if their history paper is finished yet. Consequences become a lot more vague, and it gets a lot easier to let other things get between us and more scholarly pursuits. This is, unfortunately, when a lot of people develop the habit of coaxing friends with writing to do out into the world. They're 'saving us' from our lack of a social life; after all, who wants to spend all their time bent over a dusty ol' typewriter, anyway?

And then we graduate, and suddenly, homework is no longer a part of daily life. Instead, we have housework, day jobs, the need to balance social life with responsibility, maybe kids of our own, with homework of their own to do...it gets messy, and since we're not technically being graded for our writing most of the time, it gets really easy to allow writing to be the thing that slips. Again, we're building habits. This is where even the most diligent students can turn into the kids from detention...only since detention never comes, there's nothing to break the cycle. We keep chipping away at the time allotted to anything that doesn't seem 'vital,' until one day we raise our heads and realize that we haven't written a word in weeks.

So here's another fact: time is finite. If you spend eight hours a day sleeping, and eight hours a day working, you now have eight hours left for socializing, eating, watching television, playing Dance Dance Revolution, jogging, walking the dog, and anything else that you need to do. There will come a point at which you have to decide what's actually worth your time -- and once that decision is made, you're going to have to live with it.

Please remember that you get to make the decisions about what is and is not worth your time. I watch a lot of television, take a lot of long walks, and draw a semi-regular comic strip. I also tend to spend my weeknights at home, rather than going out with friends, and don't have kids. My friend Jim has a wife and children, and watches rather less television than I do. So it goes. Once you've made your choices, you're going to be the one who does the most living with them. Make sure they're things you can really and truly handle, or you're going to find yourself right back at square one before very much time has passed.

Loving Sabotage.

Anyone who's ever undertaken a diet or exercise program can tell you that some of the hardest challenges come not from free donuts in the workplace, not from the urge to go home and watch television rather than going to the gym, but from the people who care the most about them: their friends and family. My going on a diet doesn't stop my mother from offering me candy corn, or my friends from asking if I want to go out to dinner at the local steak joint. Nor does it change the habits of everyone I know. When I'm going 'let's walk to Orinda,' half of them are going 'you're insane' and 'let's go sit in the movie theater for a marathon of Evil Dead movies.' I have to find a balance between the people I love and the things I want, and I have to remember that even when you're offering me a cupcake, the final choice to eat it is my own.

Focusing on your writing -- focusing on your hermitage -- is a lot like going on a diet. Substitute 'party' or 'dinner date' for 'cupcake,' and remember that the choice to accept what's offered is always yours. A lot of the same language can be adapted to explain your choices. "Thank you so much for the offer, but I promised myself I'd stay on my writing plan for the month; can we do tomorrow?" is a way better answer than "Screw you, no," if you want to keep having friends. And even as most diets allow a certain amount of flexibility, remember that it's okay to take a day off every once in a while, especially if it keeps our friends and loved ones happy, and thus less likely to poke us.

Most people can't tell the difference between 'I am staying home to mope around doing nothing' and 'I am staying home to write.' Even once writing has become your day job, if it ever does, this distinction is invisible. Why? Maybe because we can write in our pajamas. Maybe because we can, if we're willing to risk unpleasant paper mache incidents, process edits in the bathtub. Maybe because of all that early habit-forming homework. Whatever the cause, some people genuinely hear 'save me' when we say 'let me write.' It's best not to blame them for tempting us, and to just find a way to strike our own personal forms of balance.

Growing the Addiction.

In the end, it comes down to this: you can choose to go either way, and it really is your choice. There will always be demands on your time that you can't avoid or opt out of; it's what you do with the time that remains that will determine the course of your writing life. There is no teacher to give you encouraging lectures about your potential. There is no study hall, no detention, and nobody who's going to force you to succeed. There's only you.

Take the time you need to learn just how good you can become.

Deleted comment

seanan_mcguire

March 30 2009, 18:50:41 UTC 8 years ago

New comment

Writing a novel has a disturbing amount in common with joining Weight Watchers, except for the part where I don't think anyone's ever made somebody do aerobics in order to increase their word count.

8 years ago

mariadkins

kyra_neko_rei

March 30 2009, 18:24:12 UTC 8 years ago

Thank you. This is something I struggle with quite a lot---there are times when I am prolific and on top of things and yet others where I can go a month without writing anything, and this will hopefully help. I am one of the people who spent years not doing the homework, and after high school for several years my study philosophy was "how little can I do and still pass?" I am in the middle of changing that in both school and writing; it is not easy in the slightest, but this should help.

March 30 2009, 18:51:33 UTC 8 years ago

Time management is the monster under all our beds. Sometimes we do need to admit that we're going to be less prolific, because the time just isn't there. Still, we have to find our balances.

archangelbeth

March 30 2009, 18:25:42 UTC 8 years ago

Time to migrate to my writing machine, I see!

Thanks.

March 30 2009, 18:51:45 UTC 8 years ago

Welcome.

aryana_filker

March 30 2009, 18:49:26 UTC 8 years ago

Thank you for writing this! When my hubby asks me again about this writing time I need, I will point him to this article. :) I should go writing...

March 30 2009, 18:52:13 UTC 8 years ago

It's soothing, fun, and crazy-making! A pastime for the ages.

jenk

March 30 2009, 19:34:25 UTC 8 years ago

Most people can't tell the difference between 'I am staying home to mope around doing nothing' and 'I am staying home to write.'

Yes and no. The people who I've had the most difficulty with are the ones who never want to do anything alone, so they see you as actively preventing them from having fun if you won't go do <whatever> with them.

Then there's the people who can't conceive that different people have different interests. "Why are you reading all the time? Let's do something fun." "I am doing something fun." "No one actually reads for fun."

baka_kit

March 30 2009, 22:20:07 UTC 8 years ago

Yes and no. The people who I've had the most difficulty with are the ones who never want to do anything alone, so they see you as actively preventing them from having fun if you won't go do with them.

One of my best friends is an extreme extrovert. She hates being alone, and if her husband is at work or asleep, she'll call me just so she can have someone to talk to.

I love her, but she drives me nuts sometimes. :(

March 31 2009, 15:43:29 UTC 8 years ago

That is a very good point. Thank you!

kmarkhoover

March 30 2009, 19:41:53 UTC 8 years ago

Good post. Margaret Mitchell used to tell a story about how her friends always kept trying to get her to go out and have dinner, see movies, socialize, and she would beg off saying, "I have to stay home and work on something."

They never understood. Not really. But those who write do understand.

March 31 2009, 17:00:10 UTC 8 years ago

Which is good, because we would otherwise go quite mad.

March 30 2009, 19:51:17 UTC 8 years ago

Most writers --snip-- will not be able to make their living purely on the written word.

This is a message that needs to get out there more, imho - and loudly. I see more and more people saying they're just going to start writing and blogging and become millionaires. It always shocks me, although it shouldn't. It's not as simple as all that, but people just don't realize that. They see X doing it and making it happen and think they can, too.

and once that decision is made, you're going to have to live with it

And so do the people around you. And it's not easy. Most of them don't like it. I lost a really good, close friend last year because she just didn't respect my boundaries. It became one of those "enough is enough" battles, and I drew a line she didn't like. :/

Most people can't tell the difference between 'I am staying home to mope around doing nothing' and 'I am staying home to write.'

:groans: Isn't that the truth? It's right up there with being a full-time homemaker. People just don't realize there's actual work involved. :eye roll: Well, you're not doing anything, are you? We can go have that cup of coffee and walk through the park. Um no. I have a floor to mop and a submission to edit. No time for cat waxing here!

March 31 2009, 17:00:42 UTC 8 years ago

People don't really see the step two between 'step one: do something' and 'step three: profit' most of the time. Which is sad.

nyxalinth

March 30 2009, 20:49:01 UTC 8 years ago

When i was writing articles two weeks ago, I had a blow-up because something or someone was ALWAYS trying to disturb me in it and occasionally succeeding. Now that I have been called back to my job, writing is on the shelf again, until I finally achieve my goal of moving to New Zealand. Either that or wtiting will be weekends only.

I felt like no one but me and my long-distance partner had any respect for the fact that I was attempting to get a body of online work done to show possible freelancing clients.

March 31 2009, 17:01:28 UTC 8 years ago

It gets a little easier when you're writing to a contracted deadline; people are more likely to believe me when I say "can't, Toby" or "can't, anthology cut-off is coming." But it's never cut and dried.

March 31 2009, 19:03:58 UTC 8 years ago

Telling people I have a deadline doesn't work for me. They don't believe me. "Can't you push it back? Reschedule it?" As if. :eye roll:

lady_ravenlocke

March 30 2009, 23:29:36 UTC 8 years ago

I've been waiting to see someone address this in the way you have. Not so much the aspect of making your own choices of what to do with your writing time, but the fact that too many people hear "I'd rather stay home and write" as "save me from myself" or "I don't want to spend time with you ever." Both of these things, I've dealt with, and most of the people who were in the latter, rather insecure category, aren't a part of my life anymore. The ones in the former category, I can usually placate by showing them the project in question, or sometimes compromise, like when my Aunt takes me out to dinner. I don't turn her down; if she's asking she wants to be out and about, but I do make it clear I need to get home and get back to work once we're done eating. She's usually cool with it.

I'm so glad to see these articles coming again. I always look forward to them.

March 31 2009, 17:02:16 UTC 8 years ago

They never stopped, per se! :) It's true that they tend to go up on Wednesdays, but that's the luck of the draw, rather than anything planned; I've been careful not to have a set "release date," just so I don't make myself nuts.

I'm glad you like them!

April 1 2009, 03:51:41 UTC 8 years ago

Very much! It's always fascinating to me, to see how other authors work, and how they approach the craft. When they can do so in an infinitely entertaining way, so much the better!

kathleenfoucart

April 5 2009, 20:41:35 UTC 8 years ago

Great post. I somehow thought I'd already commented and just now realized I didn't... This is definitely something I'm relating to now. For some reason, if I sat at a computer doing data entry or copy writing all day, that would make more sense to people than me sitting at a computer writing all day, and since its the latter, obviously I should be doing something else. *confused*

Also, I wanted to let you know I'm linking back to this post from my post today (unless you don't want, I can take the link out!) since I've been thinking a lot about this lately, too. :)