How do you write AND hold down a full-time job?
Some authors can afford to work on writing full-time, and some have day jobs. It’s just the nature of the business. There are so many factors in play (health insurance is a big one) that sometimes having a job is a safety net you just can’t do without. So how do you manage to squeeze in writing time after working the 40-hours-a-week day job?
Here’s what I do:
1) Have no children. Opt to be known as the ‘crazy cat lady’ when you get older.
2) Don’t clean the house. Seriously. Don’t bother. It’s just going to get messy again. And the cats like the mystery of random piles of junk in the living room.
3) Make use of your lunch break. I used to edit on my lunch break (back when I took one). Bring a laptop or alpha-smart with you, or go over what you wrote the night before with a red pen. This can be difficult if you have a shared kitchen at work, but I find snarling at co-workers that approach and muttering to myself does the trick nicely.
4) Suck at social networking. I have a twitter window of, oh, about an hour. My LJ gets neglected when I can’t take a lunch at work. I don’t even remember how to log in to MySpace and I haven’t seen my Facebook in weeks. I might reply to your email…someday.
5) Don’t have hobbies other than writing. All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl, but she hits her deadlines.
6) Catholic Guilt. It’s a great motivator.
In all seriousness…there are lots of ways to squeeze in writing. Sometimes you’re more successful at it, and sometimes you’re not. The trick is to recognize what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are.
My biggest weakness is the internet. I’m a compulsive, A.D.D. browser. Even at work (shhhh). I can’t work on a project for longer than 5 minutes before I feel the need to click over to something else. I’ve gone to look up a state capital on Wikipedia and emerged 5 hours later after reading up on the Black Death. Seriously. Don’t let this happen to you. When I find myself sucking all my writing time away on Facebook, I set up the (non-internet-connected) laptop in the living room, or grab my alphasmart. A good time to write? My small window of reading time just before bed. I can crank out a few pages in 20 minutes and feel virtuous that I wrote.
But the biggest thing that will stop you from writing?
Do you want to write it?
No, seriously. Wanting to write a novel for the sake of writing a novel is very different than writing THAT novel because you are so excited to put the words on the page that you can hardly stand it, and you race home and race through dinner so you can give yourself a few more minutes with your book. That’s the kind of writing we all want, right? Not just putting pen to paper because you NEED to have output? (I am so guilty of that at times)
I used to have that crazy obsession with fanfiction. I used to have that insane NEED to write with some of my early novels. Somewhere between there and here, I lost it for a while. I was writing stuff that felt like homework, and I hated it when it was done. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
So I sat down and figured out what geeked me about the fanfiction, and what geeked me about the geeky novels. I wrote lists. What did I like about this? What made me squee? Some common elements came up, and I decided that I needed to start including these things in my new projects. Even if they’re subtly hidden in the background (major props if you *really* think I’m subtle), they’re there in one way or another.
That’s my recipe for success, in this order:
1) Sloth.
2) Ixnay on interwebzay
3) Geekiness
If you do those, you’ll find the time to write. Oh, and waking up early on a Saturday morning for a write-a-thon helps things too. Or a husband that watches hockey and you, say, don’t want to watch hockey. But mostly the above three.