Room in your head

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

The holiday season is now officially in full swing. Around here, it starts slowly, a bit before Halloween, then ramps up gradually until just before Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving week is a steep climb full of preparations for either going somewhere to celebrate or hosting a celebration, and after that, it’s full-out until at least Christmas, followed by the post-Christmas-sale wind-down to New Year’s Eve.

This is why so many adults start January 1 exhausted, underslept, and nursing a hangover.

It’s also why so many writers face existential angst in December because they are so behind on their book and can’t seem to write anything. (News flash: All writers are perpetually angsting because they are behind on the book they are writing, even if they have no deadline. Nobody is ever happy with how fast they are currently writing. Even if they’re producing pages at a breakneck pace, they worry because they know it won’t last.) December adds a thick layer of Things To Do on top of all the normal Things To Do (like dishes and day jobs and buying cat food, all of which still have to be done. Especially the cat food).

The problem is that there is only space in one’s head for so many things at one time. The holiday season adds an Oxford English Dictionary-sized stack of things that need room, from putting up (and taking down) decorations to buying, wrapping, and delivering gifts in a timely manner, arranging transportation and lodging for oneself or one’s visiting family, attending semi-obligatory parties (for work, for family, for different friend groups, for organizations one belongs to), making cookies or other contributions to said parties, etc. Even if one celebrates a completely different set of holidays, one cannot (at least in the U.S.) avoid the crowds of people who are frantically dealing with all these shenanigans.

Recognizing that this is inevitable is the first part of dealing with it. The second is recognizing how writing works in your particular head. Writing takes up head-space and requires energy. However, writing work can also create mental space and energy (especially finishing up a tricky scene or chapter). The question is, how fast does that happen in your particular life?

Writers who find the act of writing to be a useful way of coping with (or escaping from) stress, generally find that writing frees up some head-space fairly fast and/or gives them an immediate energy boost. At the other end of the spectrum are writers who get the opposite effect—the minute ideas go down on the page, more of them flood in and fill up the recently-emptied head-space, while their energy returns much more slowly. In the middle are those writers for whom mental space and energy seem to balance out, so that they get a small boost in each that lasts for a bit, but not too long.

The writers who get an energy boost and/or some empty head-space from writing can leverage this to their advantage during busy times, especially if the boost lasts for a bit. Working in some writing time can make doing everything else a little easier (because more energy and room to think). This usually means trying even harder than usual to defend one’s writing time. Maybe eat off paper plates for a month so there’s no need to do dishes during the holiday season.

Everybody else, though, needs to chill a bit. People would be best off if they patted themselves on the back for getting three sentences written, instead of angsting about the three pages they wanted (hoped, expected) to write. The holidays are a crazy time. Take advantage of open bits of time when you can, even if it’s barely enough to keep your hand in, but don’t expect to meet all your usual word-count goals. And really, don’t angst about it. It’ll all still be there in January when things stop being crazy.

Personally, I find the holidays a good time to revise because it doesn’t take up much new space in my brain (but revising is usually easier for me than writing the first draft, so this may not work for anybody else). You might find it best to rework your plot outline, or write up an accurate summary of what has actually happened in the first draft so far. Or organize your wild ideas folder. Or write a “holiday out-take” of that particularly obnoxious character getting thrown in a snake pit. Whatever works for you.