Defending One’s Time

One of my writer-friends, back when she had several toddlers and a day job to fit writing around, used to say that no one else will defend your time for you. You have to do it yourself. Which means you have to make writing one of your top three or four priorities. Not necessarily the one top-level must-absolutely-do-regardless thing – feeding the toddlers obviously comes before writing. But if you want to actually get writing done, it has to take automatic precedence over most of your want-to-do list. Unfortunately, most people are very bad at this.

Especially including me.

I used to say yes to nearly everything anyone wanted me to do, unless it was something I loathed, and even then, if the asker was a good enough friend (or in enough trouble), I would often say yes and hate doing it. I’m not just talking about big stuff here, like “will you help me move into my new apartment?” but little stuff as well, like “Will you hem my jeans, since I can’t sew?” or “…bake brownies for the party Saturday?”

Over the years, I have gotten a lot better at defending my writing time. I can and do say “No” to all sorts of things now that I never would have before. There’s still a major problem though, and I think that it is one that writers are especially prone to, and that is saying No to things I really would love to do, but that realistically I don’t have time to do and still write.

There are only 24 hours in a day and they are all full of something. Saying Yes to anything means implicitly saying No to everything else, because I can’t go to the concert and make dinner at the same time. All too often, the “no” comes out of my writing time.

It’s easy to push writing off to tomorrow when a friend calls wanting to go out to dinner at my favorite restaurant, especially if it’s someone I haven’t seen in a couple of years who is passing through town. It’s easy to say “I’ll catch up later” when I’m invited to go to a special event I really want to attend, whether that’s the State Fair, Shepherd’s Harvest, or the 4^th Street Fantasy Convention.

The catch is the “putting off today’s writing til tomorrow” isn’t actually putting it off; it’s dropping that two hours from the schedule entirely. Because when tomorrow comes, I will not do both the four-hour segment I was planning on and another four hours of catch-up…and even if I somehow manage to force myself to work that long, I won’t get the same amount of useful writing done as I would have gotten from two separate sessions on different days. The brain gets tired.

For brief periods, I can fool myself into thinking that this time, I’ll be able to do two four-hour sessions tomorrow, or maybe one regular session and then an extra hour every day for the next four days. Realistically, though, that trick never works. Sometimes, I manage one day, maybe even two, and then something else comes up that I want to do, and the next thing I know, I’m theoretically “catching up” by writing an extra hour every day for the next year and a half. At that point, I have to stop and admit that this is not working, and start saying no to things I really, really want to do.

This is especially important when my writing is not going very well. There are days when doing the dishes looks more attractive than swearing at a blank screen for four more hours; if somebody calls up to suggest a movie I want to see or just dinner out, I find it practically impossible to say no. It also becomes harder and harder to distinguish between “I am frustrated and will leap at any excuse to avoid working on this” and “I am getting burned out and actually do need a break.”

Because the other problem with defending one’s writing time is that one can get too energetic about it and end up burning one’s brain to a crisp, at which point it can take weeks or months to get back in the groove. In the end, it’s a balancing act, and it is easy to fall off either side … and whether one wimps out on saying “no” or burns out because one said “no” too often, the end result is no writing getting done.