Before and After the Book Deal. Courtney Maum

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СКАЧАТЬ For writers whose day jobs already require that they think, edit, and write all day for the benefit of others, it can be virtually impossible to find the reserves during the week to write creatively for themselves. And, of course, for someone who is responsible for other people in their household (offspring, aging parents), maintaining a daily writing habit is a pipe dream that bursts open during cold and flu season.

      Be wary of the people who say that you have to write every day to be a writer: they’re projecting their inadequacies onto you. Think every day about the things that you want to write, and when you have time to get to your desk, honor your intentions. You wouldn’t go grocery shopping during a dermatologist appointment: don’t organize your closet during your writing time.

      If your current schedule makes it impossible to carve out windows of writing time each week, try the bingeing route. Pick one day somewhere in your schedule where everything can go to hell except your writing, and write the hell out of that day. The author Cheryl Strayed is a notable binger—in interviews, she’s admitted that she goes for months without writing a word only to “write like a motherf*cker” at artist residencies. An editor I know, who is also a writer, sets aside Saturdays to nest with her own projects: she’ll lock herself away and write for up to ten hours at a time.

      Content goals

      For the author Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, content goals are the only way she has been able to seesaw between her writing and other responsibilities (of which parenting is one). To make her writing time more effective, she works from an outline and concentrates on completing a certain number of beats. “I focus on plot points,” Miranda says. “Sometimes it’s a whole scene, sometimes there are three or four beats in a scene. Working this way means I can always feel like I’ve accomplished something even when I’ve only had fifteen minutes to write.”

      I find content objectives gratifying, too. The first thing I do on my writing days is assess my energy and the amount of time I have to write, and then I give myself a content-related task: I’m going to write the sex scene today; I’m going to work through the father section in this essay; I’m going to get through my research on American-made automobiles in the 1930s for this thing I want to write. It’s easy to identify your manuscript’s trickiest parts: they’re the ones you’re not writing. Tackle those bits first. Start your week by writing those scenes terribly. At least they’re written! If they’re written, you can move on to making them better and more realistic, which is a far more nuanced and interesting job than getting words onto the page. If you do the hardest work first, the rest of the writing can feel like a reward.

      Stay off of social media

      Social media is the great enabler of procrastinators, so a lot of people protect their writing time by making the Internet difficult to surf. Some writers swear by web-blocking services such as Freedom; others write in cafés where they don’t know the Wi-Fi password; the truly desperate ask their roommates to change the Wi-Fi code in their apartment and to keep the code from them. During a short-lived steampunk phase, I used an old-timey hourglass to regulate my social media use: I couldn’t go online until the sand had transferred from one bulb to another. This was diverting until my cat—who has no respect for whimsy—knocked it to the floor.

      These days, I use guilt and old-fashioned self-loathing to regulate my Internet use, and when that fails, I hide my computer and write longhand, which results in meditative, restorative, and completely illegible work.

      Whatever your strategy is for getting words onto the page, don’t forget to give yourself a break from all the goal-making and the typing and the writing notes by hand. If you don’t hit your word count, if you take a phone call from a friend during your writing time, if you have a hangover and your soul needs you to watch reruns of Dynasty on your allotted writing day, you are still a writer and you’ll find another time to write.

Killing your inner perfectionist

      For reasons we will not get into here, I once attended clown school. We had to do an exercise where we walked around the room in circles at our normal pace. Then we did the exercise walking at “the speed of fun.” “The speed of fun,” explained the instructor, as people started bumping into one another, “is when you’re going too fast to hear your inner critic.”

      I’ve never met a writer who doesn’t have an internal naysayer second-guessing all she does. The problem is so common, some psychologists advise giving your self-critic a name and an identity: mindfulness blogger Wendy de Jong refers to hers as “Perf,” and in a Psychology Today article on the same subject, an anonymous client calls hers a “hungry wolf.”

      Perfectionism can be a good trait in a writer: it drives you to deliver work that is spell-checked, fact-checked, and free of glitchy formatting, while also including such essentials as nice sentences and plot. To this end, your editors will appreciate your perfectionism because it saves them time.

      But perfectionism can hold you back. So many people are afraid of writing badly, when the truth is that bad writing is the only way you’re going to start writing well. “I’m unable to write that really shitty first draft,” says the writer Hallie Goodman, who admits to being stunted by her “perfectionist bullshit.” “I’m unable to suspend judgment, I line edit as I’m writing. For me, it’s a scarcity-of-time issue. I feel like nothing can be wasted. I’m afraid of wasting time.”

      Hallie has been able to indulge this fear because she does lack time. In addition to writing and freelancing for magazines, she also runs a successful reading and workshop series called Volume, which keeps her in constant contact with authors and their publicists, students, and local commerce owners, troubleshooting and event managing to keep everything on track. But recently, Hallie was awarded a monthlong fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, and her excuses didn’t hold water anymore. “All of a sudden, I couldn’t tell myself I didn’t have time to write,” she says, “because time was all I had.”

      One thing that comforted Hallie, and ultimately got her writing, was realizing that so many other writers had the exact same problem. She met people who had affirmations tacked up all over their studios, writers who forced themselves to write two thousand words a day without a single concern for quality—the idea was just to write.

      “I had to do all these infantilizing tricks,” Hallie admits. “I put up notes like, ‘There is no bypass. You must write that shitty first draft.’ And god, I made myself a star chart,” she laughs, recounting how she walked to CVS to get herself some puffy glitter star stickers that she would put up when she allowed herself to write atrociously.

      Perfectionism can negatively affect not just how you write, but what you write, as well. Author Amy Brill spent fifteen years working on her first novel about a female astronomer in 1845 Nantucket, and her perfectionist drive to incorporate all her research nearly derailed the book. “I was so sure I had to adhere to every minute fact, every turn of phrase, every one-hundred-sixty-year-old date,” Amy admits, “that I ended up with hundreds of pages of deadly boring epistolary junk. Its verisimilitude was admirable, but as a novel, not so much.”

      When Amy lost an entire crop of research in a backpack she misplaced, what at first felt like a tragedy turned into a liberation. “The original questions—what would make a teenaged girl spend the entire night on her roof, in every season, searching for something in the night sky that would change her life—had been engulfed by thee and thou and other things that barely belong in a novel, much less on every page. I had to start over, and I did. The next version kept some of the facts about the inspiration for my character, but dispensed with most of them. If I wanted to tell the story of that girl on the roof, I had to make it up. That’s the book that became my first published novel, The Movement of Stars.”

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