Category Archives: Starting a Career

SLICING THE CAKE

A Guest Post by David Heyman

“Honey, where are you?”

Physically I’m in the store with my wife, where she is asking my opinion of an item she’s seen. In my mind though – I’m on a far-off snowy plain, trying to get my heroine out of the scrape I’ve written her into. This is the world of the writer and their family, and it’s one I’m betting most of you are familiar with. Managing the scales between the time and energy we give to our writing and the time we give to other demands can be one of the more difficult challenges an aspiring writer can face.

It’s commonly called the work/life balance, but for us it is a more complex beast – one more properly named a work/work/life balance. We all have lives that include family, friends, pets and the many activities that make life worth living. These are all wonderful, but they rightfully expect an investment of your time. Then most of us have the job that pays the bills, taking care of that rewarding life and keeping the road ahead of us clear. That job also makes demands on your time, demands that can be harder to negotiate with than Fido.

Now you want to add writing, but for most of us writing no mere hobby. It doesn’t fall into the ‘pursuits’ section of that life category. No, writing for us is our second job – the one that might not be paying bills yet, but someday….

Something’s gotta give – somewhere a sacrifice must be made.

cake

I always view my time as cake. I cut a piece of cake for my family, one for work and one for myself. If I want to write and that’s going to use some of that available time, then someone’s piece of cake is going to get smaller.

My advice: make sure you are the one making the sacrifice. Cut into your cake, not someone else’s.

Want to write on your lunch break? Sure. You can bang out that scene while you have your sandwich. Write during that boring dial-in meeting where they never call on you anyway? No, that time is committed to the job that pays the bills. Writing after play time with the kids and TV time with your spouse? Sure, but discuss it with them first.

You are the one who wants to be a writer, the big time sacrifice must come from you. Video game time, Game of Thrones watching time, Facebooking time.

Your time.

I would caution not to take all of your time, though. Don’t take away the sleep you need, or the time you exercise to stay healthy. Reserve some time for yourself to de-stress, to recharge and get the creative juices going again. Moderation is the key.

Each day is a cake that you choose where to make the cuts and choose the sizes. Your job, your friends and families all have their plates out, waiting to be serves a slice of your time.

How you distribute those slices will have a big impact on your support system going forward – and you will need that support to succeed.

David Heyman:

Dave writes both novels and short stories in the various genres of speculative fiction. His other passions include his family, gaming and reading about mountaineering. Sleep is added to the mix when needed. You can visit him at daveheyman.com

Why Finding Balance is Impossible.

A Guest Post by Jen Greyson

I’ve recently returned from two weeks immersed in writing conferences—the Superstars Writing Seminar and LTUE—with many of my writing mentors and peers, people I admire both professionally and personally. They’re both phenomenal and I always come away with lots of great nuggets about the business and industry. But this year I came away with something a little different.

While my professional life has been on a solid upward trajectory, my personal life has been headed in the other direction. The day before I left for Superstars, my husband asked for a divorce. It’s been a long time coming for lots of reasons, and I’ve asked for one prior to that day, but it still left me trying to find my feet as I showed up on the first day of the seminar.

For the days that I interacted with the people of my tribe, I was emotionally unable to stay upright. There was no balance in my life. In the same hours I was riding a professional high, my personal life was crumbling beneath my feet, making balance impossible. The juxtaposition had me leaning on the emotional strength of the people around me in an effort to find my footing (something that’s incredibly difficult for me).

The struggle to find balance is a common theme in every life, especially for artists as we often get to add our passions in the “extra” hours of our days after work and family take up the rest.

During the days of the seminar, I realized that I’d been looking at the balance of my personal and professional life through the wrong set of lenses; I’ve always thought balance was a set of scales, but I was wrong.

The balance we seek isn’t finding a way to make the scales weigh the same; the balance is finding our equilibrium.

One of my favorite life lessons came from the last line of Glennon Doyle Melton’s Carry On, Warrior. She said (I’m completely paraphrasing), “Stress creates pressure and we all know the feeling of it pressing in so hard on us that we think we can’t bear another second. We’ve been taught that pressure is bad and painful and uncomfortable, but what if it’s not? Maybe that pressure is what holds us up. It would be a great tragedy to have nothing important pressing in at all.”

Without that pressure, perhaps we’d fall over.

It’s the same with balance. Balance is finding your equilibrium in the middle of a storm standing in raging seas, dealing with the loss of support groups, or support at home, or a job, or financial support, or one of the many forms that support comes in. Our support needs shift and change just like everything else in our life and we are constantly relearning how to find our equilibrium. I think the secret to blending a writing life with a normal life is finding our equilibrium and doing it not by thinking we have to stand on our own two feet 100% of the time, but rather by not being afraid of leaning on the people in our lives when we must.

On the last day, I heard the perfect thing that summed up so much of what I’d misunderstood about how I’d been feeling for the days leading up to the end of the most favorite week of my year. Lisa Mangum (from Shadow Mountain Publishing), when asked about finding balance between a writer life and a normal life, said, “We think the two lines of our lives run parallel to each other when in fact they’re completely interwoven. They criss and they cross and zig and zag, some times they’re very far apart, sometimes they’re very close together, sometimes they’re overlapping so closely that you cannot see one from the other.”

Again, I’m paraphrasing what she said, but within the imagery that came as she spoke was a clarity that there is no way to separate writing from normal life because as writers—probably true for all artists—we see beauty and art in everything we do, whether we’re driving a car, or help our kids get dressed in the morning, or listening to a news story. There’s always a what if, there’s always a story idea that comes from everything we touch and see and smell. Switching out one life for the other isn’t as simple as changing hats or closing our computers and walking out of our office. Being a writer is not something we do—even for those who’ve been able to turn it into a business and treat books like products and not babies—but no matter what kind of writer you are, it is still who we are inasmuch as it’s what we do.

Storytellers were the community builders, they were the ones who drew people together to share common emotions, whether they were telling a thrilling story of a hunt, or a scary story about the woods, or a legend about two lovers. All those stories held one thing in common, emotion and connection. That’s who we are as storytellers, but we must not forget both sides of the story. Too often we focus on the emotion that comes in the telling of the story and we forget about the connection that comes in the creating of the story.

Balance (equilibrium) comes when we search out—and accept—the connection during the creation.

Balance is impossible because we can’t weigh the tasks and pressures, taking one kilogram from this scale and adding it to that. Equilibrium is possible. Equilibrium comes from setting our feet, and looking ahead, and being okay with the people who come alongside us and shore us up in those moments when a sneaker wave crashes against the boat and makes us lose our footing.

Jen Greyson:

Jen Greyson was first published by the international publishing house that launched the blockbuster, Fifty Shades of Grey. She has written over 45 published books and her ghostwritten works have appeared on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. She writes new adult fantasy and science fiction along with NA and adult contemporary romances. Sign up to receive alerts about her next release: http://eepurl.com/5pAE5

Writing is Life

A Guest Post from Scott Lee

I pulled in to the house, just back from my third time attending the Superstars Writing Seminar. I had spent the ride home rehearsing the arguments I would present to my wife as to why I should pull out the credit card and immediately pay for Superstars 2017. After all, the price was the lowest it would ever be, it was set to go up in the morning, and we had a rough idea that our tax return was going to be pretty sweet… Argument in the bag, right? In. The. Bag.

Then I noticed that our little car wasn’t in the drive way. Huh. Becca wasn’t home. Perhaps I would end up waiting awhile before delivering my winning Superstars argument. Or then again, Becca wasn’t home…but no, I’ve lived enough to recognize that thought as a trap.

So, I walk into the house, playing it cool, calm and confident. I had an argument to make.

***

So here I am. Blogging. About writing. And life. And balance. Feeling that I owe you, dear reader, some modicum of advice, insight or wisdom. So here goes.

As I’ve thought about this over the past few weeks I knew pretty quickly that the story I started the blog out with—I’ll finish it later, don’t worry—would have to be included somehow. It is too ironic not to be, and it embodies what thoughts I’ve managed to gather.

First off, I find that framing the question as finding balance between life and writing, writing and real life, or between art and life—creates a false dichotomy. When I considered opening with this point, I had to ask myself if I wasn’t nitpicking. Was I just giving way to personal prejudice against any dichotomy? Everyone talks about writing this way. But I don’t think I’m just picking nits. We can talk about balancing priorities in life, we can talk about where writing fits in our lives, but as long as we split life from writing, even subconsciously, we’re self-sabotaging.

My job doesn’t define me. I am a teacher, but it’s a single facet of who I am not the sum of my identity. Even so, I don’t separate my role as a teacher from my life. It’s not something I go and do when I’m not living. And my role as a writer is no different. If you allow yourself to separate your writing from your “life,” then you make any pursuit of writing time, let alone balance, much harder.

Furthermore, in my experience, most writers are likely to experience things in exactly the opposite direction. It is writing that feels most like life. If we adopt a mental stance where we’re saying that isn’t true, suddenly we’re trying to find time for and balance with, a triviality. Good luck with that.

Second, in practical experience I’ve most often found “balance” by being a binge writer. My typical day didn’t include writing at all. And then when the muse struck in the form of some deadline, I became a zombie with an IV drip of caffeine who taught school and was hubby/daddy during the hours in a day that a sane person was awake, and, during the late night and early morning hours, I wrote like mad in order to get the paper done while the house was quiet. I wrote my grad school papers, my published short story, and my published short story collection/thesis, in this fashion. By the way, 16-19 hours of work/family followed by 5-8 hours of writing, is not balance, it’s insanity. But when I had to, I got writing done, and that seemed like enough. Not an approach I recommend.

I began to make headway a few years ago, when we went on our 10th anniversary vacation. We picked a destination vacation rather than a running-around-seeing-things vacation, and our schedule was determined almost entirely by my writing. I got up in the morning a bit before Becca and wrote my morning pages—three pages, long hand—a daily journaling/meditation exercise I encountered through Julia Cameron’s Artist’s Way books. Then, later, we made our way down to the public library where I’d get a guest pass and a computer and write while Rebecca patiently read whatever caught her eye. I never wrote for more than an hour and a half in a sitting, and most days I wrote for just at an hour, if not a little less. In those five days I wrote well over 10,000 words of new fiction. Not the most I’d ever put together over five days, but I did it without a deadline, without having to try to kill myself in the process, and without suddenly achieving the miraculous hours and hours of writing time I had been subconsciously waiting for before I could “get serious.”

The point isn’t go take a long vacation to Telluride, Colorado without any kids, it’s that in less than two hours-a-day, I put out one of the best steady chunks of words I ever had, and at the end of the process I was neither dead, high on caffeine, delirious, nor stressed out of my mind. I did it as a small part of my ordinary life.

When I got home I had to admit to myself—for the first time, although it seems painfully obvious in retrospect—that I could in fact find balance. Make time to write without killing myself. And I started doing so.

I would love to tell you that I immediately became incredibly disciplined and dove into writing what is now my bestselling novel an hour or less at a time over the next few months. That’s not what happened. My life wasn’t transformed. Nor was my writing. But I wrote more than I ever had, with greater regularity, greater ease, and less stress. And I produced more than I’d ever produced on any single project before.

So here’s my two tiny bits of wisdom: (1) You don’t need a ton of time. Just because Kerouac supposedly wrote On the Road as a highly caffeinated high speed physical endurance test doesn’t mean you have to somehow trade life for writing time. You don’t. Make writing time a part of your life. Make it routine, work-a-day, consistent. Don’t bargain for hours, days, weeks, months, or a year’s sabbatical with your work or your family. Bargain with yourself for an hour or so at a shot, or when you get really smart for any tiny snatch of free time. Make writing life. And you will discover more time and more peace than seems possible if you haven’t done it yet.

(2) Writing isn’t separate from life. In Neil Gaiman’s excellent “Make Good Art” commencement speech, he suggests that the response to negative experiences in life ought to be make good art. I often hear people simplify this to “When life happens to you, make good art!” I know what they mean, but it makes me sad. Because it’s wrong. Art isn’t the counter to life. It’s the ultimate expression of life, and its beauty, tragedy, and value. Art—or writing—isn’t just a record of life, it is the most positive and life affirming of human of acts—the act of creation. So don’t pit your writing against your life. Because the minute you pit anything against your life instead of embracing it as part of your life and making it essential, it will lose. Every. Single. Time.

Now I promised you the rest of the story…

***

My wife was waiting for me back in our room. I felt something coming, kind of the way the lady tied to the tracks in a classic melodrama must feel something coming.

“Hi Becca,” I said. “What happened to the car?”

“Well,” she said, “about that. I was driving on the other side of town today and every warning light on the dashboard came on at once. So I took it to the Toyota dealer. They say the transmission is shot. It’s going to be $5000 dollars to replace it.”

I asked about Superstars 2017 anyway. Why? Because writing is part of my life. An essential part. My wife knows and supports this. We talked about it. I didn’t apologize for asking, and she didn’t yell at me for being stupid, selfish or ridiculous or impractical.

I haven’t paid for Superstars 2017…yet. And I won’t for a while. Seems we need that big tax return elsewhere. I didn’t insist on paying for Superstars immediately, or get down about not being able to. Instead, we made plans for exactly how to pay for it later.

I’ll pay for my car now, because that’s part of my life, and I invest in it. I’ll go to Superstars next year, because writing is part of my life, and I invest in it. In the mean time I’ve had a few hours here and there, and I’m about finished with draft one of a new short story. I’ve loved writing it. I haven’t had a lot of time, but I’m getting it done, and every minute so far has been pure pleasure.

 

Scott Lee:

Scott Lee is a strange individual who chose teaching and writing as his two primary careers. Obviously he has no desire to make any money, and on that count has largely succeeded. He has, however, written much poetry, some individual short stories, published a short story collection entitled Singular Visions, directed 15 plays, and fathered several human children to go along with his less material offspring. He has thoroughly succeeded, in his own humble opinion, at living a worthy and interesting life.

Chasing a Dream and the Temptation to Work Yourself to Death

A day doesn’t go by when one of my writer friends proudly proclaims online, “It’s 3am, I should sleep but I just need to finish this scene. I’ll rest when I’m dead.” It’s almost like a badge of honor for writers to show others how late into the night they work, sacrificing sleep, personal time, and free time. When I started focusing my life and career toward writing, these were the posts that I thought I needed to live up to. They were inspirational. Sacrifice all for your dream. Go, go, go, until there’s nothing left.

Now, whenever a post pops up on my feed about another writer pushing themselves to the limit, I keep scrolling. Because that kind of behavior takes me back to a nightmare time in my life when I worked in that job.

Most of us have had that job. The job where you worked long, thankless hours. Where high stress was your every day norm. The boss you hated, breathing down your neck. The one where each day felt like you lost years of your life. The one where you reached burn out after only a couple of weeks.

I come baring good news: writing is not that job.

Don’t make it that job.

In a short, fantastic read over on Medium.com by Jessica Seeman, Jessica points out that working hard felt like a non-negotiable. “Working hard is ignorance. Because I was young, and my narcissistic boss told me it is the only way.” But working that hard takes energy away from other activities necessary for your health. “Working hard is selfish. For I am robbing my family and friends from my presence, love and attention.”

When I was working for small businesses and startups, it seemed like not taking a break was held in high regard. But science tells us taking breaks not only makes you more productive, it also makes your work better. When you’re busy and have deadlines, it feels counterintuitive to take a break. But taking those breaks helps you stay focused on the task at hand, helps your brain take in information and make connections, and helps us reevaluate what’s important. 

Doing the best you can in the time allotted is good enough.  There is no need to hyperextend or overexert yourself. The work will be there for you to do, no matter what state you put yourself in to do it.

Don’t get me wrong. You will have deadlines. And some of those deadlines will be tight, and you will have to occasionally give up some free time. But if you allow your free time to be taken over time and time again, then that’s exactly what will happen until you decide to stop it, or until burnout stops you.