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Creativity in the midst of chaos
By Dawn Montgomery | August 1, 2008
I’m still a relatively new mother with an energetic and prone to meltdown toddler. My husband is unbelievably supportive of my decision to be a writer and does everything he can to help, but there’s only so much he can do.
You see, I hold two jobs. One full time, 13-14 hour a day, 5 day a week job plus a part-timer on the weekends. In addition to that, we have our son who is showing signs of delayed learning and gets frustrated easily by being unable to communicate. My husband is a full time work from home web writer. Our schedules weren’t always this hectic, but 2008 was apparently the year of upheaval. LOL.
The hardest part is finding a balance. I don’t mean absolute peace and tranquility. (In my house? Not likely!) I mean you have to know your limitations. This means you don’t have the luxury of waiting on the muse to come out and play. You see, if your muse is flighty, trade her in. You need a workaholic, one that will be working in the background of your mind while you go about your daily life. If you don’t, you’ll be unable to write in chaos and that, my friends, is the hardest part about my life.
So how do you do it? How do you find time to write when there isn’t any?
I wrote down my schedule, from wakeup to bed. Every time I had a break during my workday, I wrote it down. When I was at home and writing, I wrote down the amount of time it took for checking email and replying, the amount of words I was able to write at any given hour, and the number of times I had to get up and go take care of something related to the house. This was during a looming deadline, btw.
And I noticed a few things.
1. I wake up at 4:30am every morning. Some days my day doesn’t begin until 6:00am so during that time I could easily catch up on email. (Especially since there’s NO WAY I can write that early. I’ve tried, I waste more time trying to focus on the screen than writing)
2. I have an hour for lunch. Not every day, but most days I have unimpeded writing time. Hmmm.
3. When I get home the world is in chaos. I’m home, the house is in an uproar (even the basset hound gets into it and you know how hard it is to get them excited about ANYTHING), and the clamor continues on well into dinner. So before dinner I can get no writing done. As a matter of fact, any time I’ve attempted it, unless the boy’s asleep (which is rare), my word count over a few hours barely breaks 1K. That’s not efficient. Yes, every little bit helps, but if I’m staring at the screen for 2 hours and nothing gets written, it’s not helping. It’s frustrating.
4. My day ends at 10pm. I might have those extra special nights where the spark of creativity will guide me into the wee hours of the morning, but those are rare and I have to overcompensate the next day due to lack of sleep.
5. My weekends are easier to grab snatches of writing time but they’re not predictable, easy to manage, or always available.
So now that I’ve carved out snatches of time I can write in, let’s see what it does for me.
Morning…email only. I did a couple of things to make this easier.
1. I culled through my many many yahoo groups and switched to digest on those that I adore and avidly read and dropped those I ignored in my inbox.
2. I put those priority emails, those from people I’m in constant contact with on an email basis in their own folder. So when they email me, it flags and I can handle those, at least.
Lunch…I stopped coming home for lunch. It prevents my son from going crazy for the entire hour I’m home and keeps Dad on a steady schedule. His writing time isn’t interrupted due to my abrupt arrival and departure and that means he’s happier too. Instead, I now write at lunch. I bought an ASUS eee laptop that I take with me and power up just for those moments. So 1 hour.
Get home…I don’t even think about writing. It’s family time. We hang out, we talk about our days, the kiddo climbs all over and around me. We color, we read, we play games or we’ll watch a movie. Then Dad and Mom chat about stuff while the dinner’s getting prepared. I vent, he vents, and then we feel better. Some days the kiddo is wound so tight nothing will calm him down.
After 8pm is my writing time. I have two hours of productive time at this point. By this hour of the night my mind has been racing like crazy, working to fill in all the details I’d wanted to put in the story. I sit down and my fingers fly. Two hours=1.5-2K words for me. It’s the rough draft, so I’m not worried about editing. I take notes as I go in order to remind myself about mundane things, the clothes the heroine is wearing, how long the hero’s hair is, where the spaceship is parked LOL. It’s important to note…I don’t write at my desk anymore. I write wherever I can. My ASUS comes out and I write outside, or in the living room, or once, when the kiddo had a bad dream, I was writing in his bedroom when he kept waking up just to make sure I was there.
On a bad day I get 500 words done. On my best, 3K or more. If I only wrote during the work week I’d have 2500-15000 words. This is before my unpredictable weekend starts.
With my new schedule I’ve been able to do two things…
1. Give my family a predictable time in which I’m slow to respond
2. Take a day off on Saturday (from writing at least) and just enjoy some family time
Topics: Dawn Montgomery, Left Behind and Loving It |
August 1st, 2008 at 10:35 am
Nice post, Dawn. I envy organised people
Kim <— who can never remember where she parked her spaceship *grin*
August 1st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
I’m so glad you were able to block out that much time. (And that it works!) I wish I could do that
My hubby works two jobs so most nights it is just me and the kids. And because I work days now when I come home it’s mommy can we do this and that and this and that LOL
*covers ears.
Keep up the writing!
August 1st, 2008 at 1:47 pm
LOL Kim. Do you have one of those morphing models? The kind that change shapes to match your environment or the cloaking ones? ROFL. I’m glad you enjoyed the post.
Michelle, it was HARD to block any time at all. *hugs* I wish there was a handbook for this. LOL. You’ve got my sympathies!
Keep on writing ladies!
August 1st, 2008 at 2:03 pm
LOL Kim. Do you have one of those morphing models? The kind that change shapes to match your environment or the cloaking ones? ROFL
My chameleon circuit’s broken…so you think it would be easy to find…
August 1st, 2008 at 2:06 pm
ROFLMAO.
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
I like the idea of trying to make things more predictable. I envy organized people too. Shoot, right now I envy people who have ANY help with kids and house.
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:29 pm
*hugs* Anna, I hear ya hon. But these ladies can tell you, I didn’t start out organized. At all. It took forever to get myself on some kind of schedule. What about you? What time of the day is the most quiet for you?
August 9th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
It depends on the day. When hubby’s at work and the older kids are at school, then it’d be mid-morning. Otherwise, it’s probably after 9 pm. I used to be able to write for a few minutes at a time, but have trouble concentrating that well now. LOL.
August 9th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
LOL. I bet you look forward to those quiet mid-morning moments. After 9pm is getting harder and harder for me now, but I’m still trying!