Wisdom and Knowing What to Ignore

This quote sits on my desktop at my day job:

"The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook." - William James

When I hunted this quote up, I was experiencing a great deal of stress at work.  Every day seemed like a constant series of aggravations and annoyances.  Stress made me more sensitive and even the smallest things that I would usually shrug off were getting to me.  This all made me extremely unpleasant to live with (just ask my family).

Stepping back and assessing the importance of each of these daily annoyances helped me to put my daily stressors into perspective.  A looming deadline for filing a document?  That's important.  A coworker being rude to me?  Not so important.  Certainly not worth ratcheting up my stress level when there's work to be done.

Knowing what to overlook has made a difference in my work environment.  Wisdom, well, that will come.

How to Handle Praise

Without any kind of ego, I have to say that I get complimented on my writing fairly often.  Full disclaimer: many of these compliments come from my writing group, and my friends/ coworkers/ acquaintances.  Some have come from teachers and instructors, staff at a writing school, and mentor-writers.

It has taken me a long time to learn how to accept a compliment.

Here's what I do:

1) Blush - I can't help it.  I just never grew out of blushing.  In fact, I started blushing in my teens and never grew back out of it.  If you don't blush, try just taking a breath.  Pause and let what was said sink in.

2) Say "Oh come on" or some variant of this - This is my natural instinct.  I'm self-deprecating by nature.  Rather than taking the popular advice of being a braggart, I've stuck with this instinct and, as a result, people have often commented on how humble I am.  Note: When I need to be, I am very assertive.  Kinda have to be in my day job.

3) Say "Thank you" - Accept the compliment.  After that initial hesitation, which as I indicate, I can't really keep myself from making, I can take the praise at face value and let it warm me up.

For many people, skipping the second step feels more natural.  If that's the case, great.  If you're an introvert like me, try this.  It often leads to a more fulsome conversation about writing in general and eventually, you can stop blushing.

Stop Writing and Take a Break!

Popular opinion has it that a writer should write every single day, snow or rain, heat or gloom of night. But we don’t belong to the U.S. Postal Service (which, by the way, does not claim this or any other official motto), so why do we adhere to such a stringent credo?

Certainly, there is a benefit to practicing your craft. How else would we get better? And for an aspiring writer, like me, perseverance is important to completing and submitting manuscripts on a regular basis.

But every day? That’s sounds like a job.

For the most part, I believe in treating my writing like a “real” job. I invest a lot of time in it and I do some part of it every day – either research, submissions, querying, networking, or, yes, writing. At least, I try to. When I don’t do anything writing-related for a day, I feel bad about myself, as if I was playing hooky from school.

Yet, I have to remember this: every job, no matter how demanding, grants time off. Annual leave, vacation, weekends, holidays. These are requirements of work too.

So why don’t we treat our writing like a job with a break now and then. Yes, I enjoy writing. I love writing and I love the feeling that comes with having spent a good chunk of time in front of a computer, creating pages and pages of fiction.

But…but…but, we need breaks, even from a part of our lives that we love. I’m not advocating a two day stretch every week or even every month. I still believe I need to keep my nose to the grindstone if I want to keep finishing one or more manuscripts every year.

I am suggesting at least an annual stretch of non-writing time. No touching the computer for a week, let’s say. It’s hard. You may be anxious to get back to writing during this time, even after just a day. Resist.

If you must, jot down ideas as they come to you during your break but limit this activity to a few minutes a day.

That strong itch to get back to your writing will stand you in good stead when your break is over and you will see your work with renewed energy and insight.

Photo courtesy of zirconicusso at freedigitalphotos.net

Faking It, or How to Write under a Pseudonym

I, Nan Comargue, write sweet or semi-sweet (bittersweet?) romance novels. Recently, however, I’ve been reading and dabbling in writing erotic romances. In fact, I currently have a manuscript for an erotic romance call for submission on the go and I am dead set on finishing it in time for the July 1st deadline.

The problem is, when someone sees the name Nan Comargue (or will see it in the future, when my books are someday accepted for publication), they will know me as a sweet/ semi-sweet romance writer. They will not be expecting hot and explosive erotic romance, which I also want to publish. For one thing, I don’t want to offend any of my mythical sweet romance readers but I also don’t want to “trick” an erotic romance reader into buying a sweet story.

So what to do?

The answer I’ve come up with is a pseudonym.

But…but…but…is this a valid case for creating and stepping into a whole new identity?

Well, let’s look at some of the reasons writers use pseudonyms.

Privacy:
You teach schoolchildren or preside over traffic court in your day job. You may not, for obvious reasons, want the parent of a child you teach or an offender who comes before you to know your innermost sexual desires…because, to some extent, that’s what romance writing conveys. It may just be a wicked fantasy in your mind but someone, somewhere, will think this is what you do outside of your work.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  But you may not want your erotic writing to be the first thing someone thinks of when they see you in your day job.

In another scenario, your name may identify your ethnic or religious origins, which you may have reason not to publicize.

In both cases, a pseudonym can help for you to eliminate the risk of notoriety.

Avoid confusion:
Your name may be very common or extremely unusual. In the first case, you may not want to be confused with that famous singer because no one who searches your real name on the internet will ever find your romance novels. In the latter instance, you may want to protect your privacy (see above) or that of your family and make it easier on a potential reader to spell or pronounce your name.

Another instance of confusion, which applies to me, is not knowing what you’re marketing. No reader wants to spend time scratching their heads wondering if they’re buying a sweet or erotic romance. According to the trusty internet, writing in multiple genres (or, in my case, subgenres) can be a valid reason to come up with a pseudonym. Yay!

Volume:
You write too many books and don’t want your readers to think you churn them out by rote (thus leading to the assumption that they can't be of very good quality). Multiple pseudonyms can hide this fact.

You’re Two People:
Collaborators can sometimes find it easier to write under a single name. Let’s face it, the vast majority of authors are a single individual, so you may not want to stand out with your cover page being littered with multiple names. Or, as well, one or more of the collaborators may wish to obscure their identities for one of the reasons mentioned above.

There are probably as many reasons for having pseudonyms as there are pseudonymous authors out there. At the end of the day, you have to feel comfortable with your decision. Think about it carefully, it may affect your writing career for many years down the road.

As for me, I’m still thinking it over. I’ll let you know what I decide.

Photo courtesy of m_bartosch at freedigitalphotos.net

Day Jobs for Writers

I'm not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling.  Sadly, I haven't even published a book.  But another huge difference between myself and the two authors I mentioned is that they can support themselves off of their writing (Rowling's story is particularly transformative) while most writers cannot.

The hard truth is that most writers who publish and even make money off of their writing do it out of sheer love of the creative craft.  The anecdotal evidence is that they don't make enough money to support themselves.  Very very few rise to the status of the Kings and the Rowlings to make fortunes from writing.

Recently, I found a funny link on Lewis Lapham's Lapham Quarterly website about writers in the past and their day jobs.  The range of their salaries, adjusted to modern dollars, is from $1,828(!) to $50,000 per year.  Poor Charlotte Bronte.  But even more profound is how many of these jobs were uncreative clerical or government jobs.  Hardly the stuff of imagination, you would think.  Yet these individuals, working at their modest jobs, created The Waste Land and Jane Eyre.  Perhaps the tedium of work enhances the fantasies building within the worker's minds.  We've all experienced how performing a repetitive task can sometimes set your mind free to wander and come up with ideas.

But, in the end, they probably didn't show up at their jobs every day because they wanted a chance to ponder over plots while filing papers.  They did it because they liked to eat.  And stay out of the rain.  And sleep in a warm bed.  All necessary parts of life.  But, to a writer, so too is writing.

So how do we balance the two?

I previously posted a series on how to balance your writing and your day job.  These tips can help you to make most of your time both during breaks at work, during your commute, and at home.  True, work gets in the way of writing but it shouldn't put an end to it.  Perish the thought.

And when you get down about juggling the two: remember that some of the greatest poets and authors in history have held down day jobs and still managed to create everlasting masterpieces.  So, look out, Stephen King!

How to Balance Your Writing and Your Day Job – Part 5: Get Help

No man or woman, even a writer, is an island. To get through your day, you need a group of people, seen and unseen, who support you.

I take a train every morning that someone conducts for me. I purchase a coffee someone else has brewed and poured out. I accomplish the daily tasks at my work because my colleagues help and assist me.

Paid or unpaid, willing or indirectly conscripted, we depend on these offerings of assistance from other people every day. So why shouldn’t we need and want help in our writing careers?

Sources of assistance

Everyone around you should be viewed as a potential source of help, support, and even inspiration.

Books contain disclaimers, acknowledgements and thank yous for a reason. A novel might be created by a single person whose name appears on the front cover but it’s also a team effort involving all those who appear on the dedication page and even those alluded to (in the negative sense) in the usual disclaimer: “Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead...”, etc.

The usual suspects are your friends and family. But you may also want to think about your colleagues and co-workers, your writing friends (both in person and online communities) and your idols or mentors.

If you’re in the process of paring down your time drains, you may be thinking about hiring someone to assist you in one of many ways, such as: performing a chore you spend time on (either daily tasks like cleaning or one offs like designing your website) thereby freeing up your time for writing, providing expert advice in a subject you aren’t versed on (accounting, legal, and editing come to mind), and providing emotional support (often gratis).

Getting help

The only way to receive help is to ask.

The people around you who love and care about you won’t know what they can do to support you unless you tell them. Don’t be afraid. It takes a few minute of conversation, as formal or informal as you want to make it.

If you want to get some time off from your day job to write, such as a leave of absence from your employer or a flex time arrangement, this will be a more formal process. First, look up your company’s policies and find out if you qualify for what you’re thinking about requesting. Next, put it in writing. Offer solutions. If the company’s needs may be negatively affected by your proposal, brainstorm solutions to mitigate these affects before you make your request. Plan out your finances and make sure you can afford the resulting decrease in your income.

For people you may not see on a regular basis (online friends, influences, mentors, etc.), this conversation will take effort and forethought. Think about how best to approach the issue. It may be as simple as starting an email off with “Can I ask you a favour? Feel free to decline you don’t have the time or interest. I won’t be offended :)!” And make sure you aren’t. When you’re asking someone to do something for you, their refusal should not make you grudging. It’s not personal. People have other time commitments and interests that take up their free time. Just as you’re trying to balance your life, they’re trying to balance theirs. Be understanding.

For formal arrangements like hiring someone to mow your lawn every week or file your tax return, look for referrals from the people mentioned above. If you can’t get a good local referral, try the Better Business Bureau and, of course, the internet. Up front research will save you trouble later.

What kind of help do you need? 

You want: an expert to tell you how to perform a task, more time to write without encroaching chores or commitments, daily reminders to keep at it and a cheerleading section for when you try and fail. Some of these kinds of help may be out of your reach for financial or other reasons.

Free types of help include: 

• ask someone to discuss your goals with you on a regular basis (doesn’t have to be daily) – this will serve to keep you on track
• ask someone to give you a daily reminder of when it’s time for you to write – this might work better for an online friend
• tell your friends and family what times you’ve dedicated to your writing and ask them to leave you alone during this period (except for emergencies) – it may help you both to outline what matters you think qualify as ‘emergencies’
• ask someone to trade time-consuming chores with you, such as cleaning, cooking, babysitting, so that you can write – you don’t have to trade the same chore as you can easily promise to watch your neighbours’ kids on Saturday night in exchange for having him cook you a week’s worth of dinners – remember to keep up your end of the bargain when the time comes

Remember that the ultimate goal of obtaining assistance is to further your writing career. Be flexible. You may not be able to have your mentor read through your entire manuscript but she may give you an introduction to a worthwhile contact such as a great editor. Take what you can use and be grateful, even if you have to decline.

Good luck on your writing goals!

Photo courtesy of Pixomar at freedigitalphotos.net

How to Balance Your Writing and Your Day Job – Part 4: Simplify

Your whole life is spent running from one commitment to the other. There’s barely enough time in the day to eat a real meal or sleep properly, much less write fiction. Never mind the time crunch – you can’t even find the energy to sit down in front of a computer and be creative.

Your writing career and your day job seem to be pitted against each other in a battle to the death. One of them must go. But it can’t be your job…you need it! So what’s the solution?

I don’t believe you have to give up on your dreams of being a published writer (or whatever your actual dream might be) just because you also have a day job that you need to go to every day in order to survive.

The solution to a hectic, overcrowded life is…take a breath, hold it for five seconds…three, two, one…let it out…

Simplify

Simplifying your life merely means taking out the unimportant and leaving the essential, important aspects.

What are the things (people, activities, even possessions) that are important to you? If you don’t know already, spend some time thinking about it. You can’t simplify, part of which involves eliminating the extraneous, without know what it important and what is extraneous.

If you’re like me, you balance your day job, your writing, your family, your friends, your partner, your community activities, your hobbies, your entertainment and a dozen other commitments on a daily basis. It’s exhausting. If you’ve decided your writing career is one of the most important aspects of your life (and frankly, why would you be engaging in this process if it wasn’t?), then you may need to trim the other categories.

Eliminate

The simple way to simplify is to cut out those categories that consume the most time. One of your hobbies is sailing but it involves many hours every weekend on the water. You like sailing but you like writing about sailing a little better nowadays. You cut out sailing. This may or may not be a good idea. But it has certainly freed up some of your precious time.

Automate

The better choice for simplifying your life is to automate it. Put your finances online and automate your regular bills. You’ve just saved yourself an hour or two every month when you sit down at the dining table, write checks, lick envelops, and give yourself a headache.

Online tools can be used to automate everything from your grocery shopping list to your work. Many of these are even free. Try some of these out and keep what works for you.

Organize

The most pointless time drains stems from a lack of organization. How many times have you spent an hour searching for an item that you could have found easily if you had a better system for your tools, your files, your clothes, or what have you?

A few practical storage mechanisms, a calendar and reminder system can save a ton of time and effort. This is one area where the investment of time up front (to create the organizational system) will save you time in the long run. Online tools are also available for keeping track of your time, possessions, etc.

Transform

I’m not saying stop spending time with your friends or stop volunteering but do these things in quality rather than quantity.

Instead of spending two hours every week with your friend at a movie theatre, where you can’t talk to each other anyway, why don’t you spend every other week catching up over a two hour dinner? Instead of volunteering every weekend to build houses, why don’t you try getting on the board of the agency that builds the houses, which meets every month? All of these options are just as valuable, the latter ones just don’t take as much time.

Come on, breathe with me. You can do it. Wait, I can simplify that. Do it.

Photo courtesy of Pixomar at freedigitalphotos.net

How to Balance Your Writing and Your Day Job – Part 3: Find the Time

Sure, it’s great to have goals. And a plan is a lovely thing. But when do you find the time to work towards your goals and execute your plan? Indeed, you might not even have the time to work on creating your plan in the first place.

I have the same problem and the same underlying tension between the demands of my day job and my writing life. I want to write 24/7 but when push comes to shove, I have to eat, clothe myself and put a roof over my head. Like most people, I not only have to put in the requisite number of hours at my day job, I have to find the energy to complete my work during the day, leaving very little energy (not to mention time) to write and strive towards my goals for my writing self.

Interstitial time

Time doesn’t just come in increments of an hour or more. Don’t give up on writing for the day just because you won’t have an afternoon or a full hour to work on your writing.

Take time where you can find it. Actually, if you think about it, this is what we’re all doing already. We squeeze in a workout between home and work. We spend our break calling the credit card company and our lunch hour picking up a few items from the grocery store. Nowadays, that’s how we get by.

I call these increments interstitial time. It’s the time we find in between the bigger (usually already committed) blocks of time.

The big blocks are Work, Family, Sleep, etc. Every other minute in the day is essentially up for grabs.

Finding the time

I’ve created a list of likely categories of interstitial time which may exist in your life. By cobbling together a few of these short periods, you can find time to write – or at least plan to write, or research, or edit a few pages you’ve already written.

Commute: if you’re on a bus or train for longer than five or ten minutes, you can make use of this time to write.

Work Breaks and Lunch: Let your partner pick up the groceries today. Or instead of waiting on hold with the credit card company, drop them an email. Free up your fifteen and thirty minute breaks in the workday to do something for your writing career. Think about it like your second job; you just do it in between the first one.

Wake Up Early or Go to Sleep Late: Create some time by carving out a small slice of that big block called Sleep. You may not want to do it every day but a half hour on the weekends before the family gets up or at the end of the day after the kids are in bed can give you the time to write a page a day or even more. After a year, you’ve got a decent sized book!

These are just a few of the places where I’ve found interstitial time. If you look hard, you can find some slices of time in your own life. Put them to use.

Photo courtesy of Pixomar at freedigitalphotos.net

How to Balance Your Writing and Your Day Job – Part 2: Break it Down

Given an unlimited time to write and study the craft of writing, there is no doubt that most people would achieve some success. Talent is great, but time and practice are also key.

We may all feel we have the talent to be a great writer, but what we lack is the time.

Eating up that time are the people and things that make life worthwhile: your family and friends, your enjoyment of a good meal or a summer day or a good book.

But also pressing on your precious daily hoard of twenty-four hours is your day job. It’s what you need to do five days out of seven, fifty weeks out of fifty-two, in order to keep body and soul together.

The Plan

Once you have a goal, you need to figure out how to achieve that goal. I call this The Plan.

The Plan can take considerable thought, preparation and research. Don’t let that deter you. A solid plan created up front can prevent a whole lot of frustration later.

Break it down

By this time, you know what you want to achieve in your writing career because you’ve written down this goal. Hopefully, you’ve kept it someplace prominent where you see it every day. This will keep your writing goal at the forefront of your mind.

The essence of The Plan involves breaking down your writing goal into manageable steps or milestones. Yes, you want to publish a book-length work of fiction in five years. But that may not happen all at once on the last day of the fifth year. In fact, it can’t.

Publishing a book takes time and effort. You have to figure out what you want to write about. Then you actually have to write the book. Next comes editing. And more editing. These are all steps in the process.

So, if your goal is to publish a book in five years, your Plan may look something like this:

1. Figure out what to write about

2. Write an outline of your book

3. Write the first chapter

4. Write the second chapter, etc.

5. Seek critiques and then re-write all of the above chapters

6. Edit and polish your manuscript until it shines

7. Write a query letter

8. Write a synopsis

9. Research literary agents

10. Send your query package out to likely agents

As you can see, this is a one- or two- year portion of your ultimate plan. You haven’t gotten published yet. You haven’t even had a nibble. But part of breaking down your plan is to know which portions of the process you can control. In essence, you can control your writing. You can control the quality of your manuscript, query and synopsis. You can control the depth of your research into likely agents or publishers who might be interested in your manuscript.

You cannot control when or if your manuscript is accepted for representation and publication. All you can do is put forward your best case – and much of that will depend on how well you perform this step.

So, go on, break it down. Hammer time! Uh…I mean, writing time!

Photo courtesy of Pixomar at freedigitalphotos.net

How to Balance Your Writing and Your Day Job – Part 1: Set a Goal

Unless you’re independently wealthy, you have one.

Love or hate it, you do it every day. In fact, you spend the most time out of your life -- with the possible exception of sleep -- doing it.

It’s your day job.

Your day job is what keeps you (and your family) sheltered, clean, fed, and otherwise off of the streets.

But you also want to be a writer. Possibly, you already are. You just need someone to notice your writing and give you some money for doing it. That is your dream. So how do you achieve your dream, in the face of the time and energy commitment required by your job?

You need to do your day job. No two ways about it. Without this dedication of eight (or more) hours a day, you would not survive. So you are stuck with those eight hours, give a take a few, plus the time you spend getting to that job every day, called the dreaded commute.

Set a goal

In your day job, it’s easy to know what you’re striving towards. Often, your boss or supervisor tells you what your goals are in so many words. They may be measurable – so much the better – in a statistic, or a win in court, or just finishing the work day without any major problems.

When the subject is your writing career (or lack thereof), it’s much harder to measure that success, particularly if you haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about what you want to ultimately achieve. Daydreaming about collecting the Pulitzer Prize for Literature may or may not count.

Without a definite goal in mind, it’s easy to drift. Trust me, I know. I spent a lot of time daydreaming (and, fortunately, writing too) but I didn’t take any time to find out what to do with my growing pile of manuscripts.

What is it you hope to achieve from your writing? In other words, what is your writing goal?

Come on, you must have one. Perhaps you want to win a big writing contest or prize. Maybe you just want to see your name on the cover of a book – your book.

It’s likely you’ve just never articulated that goal, even to yourself, much less taken the time to write it down.

Do that now.

It’ll take five minutes to do and you can even find the time to think about it on the train, or in the car while you’re stuck in traffic. It will take even less time to jot your goal down in a notebook.

Once you have it written down, make that goal visible and make it tangible. Inbed it into your brain. You will come back to it. Very soon.

Photo courtesy of Pixomar at freedigitalphotos.net

How to Balance Your Writing and Your Day Job – Overview

Finding a sustainable work-life balance is one of the most difficult tasks of modern life. Add to that a demanding “hobby” like creative writing and we can all find ourselves making frantic introspective deals, such as, I’ll take a nap this afternoon and write fifty pages tomorrow to make up for it.

In spite of my good intentions, I often fail to keep such deals with myself and, as a result, my writing suffers.

Over the next few posts, I will provide some insight into how I’ve managed my “day job” and my “night job” – my writing. For now, I will just give a brief overview of my process. Keep in mind that this is my process. What works for me may not work for you (although I sincerely hope that it does!).

Set a Goal

The first step in my personal balancing act is to set a goal for myself. I dream big so my goal is a whopper: publish a book in the next five years.

Break it Down

The only way to reach a destination you haven’t been before is to follow the map. I will give you a run down of how to create that map by breaking down a big goal into manageable and (hopefully) achievable steps.

Find the Time

It’s all well and good to have a roadmap of where you want to go, but what if you don’t have the time to take the trip in the first place?

Carving out the time to write and to work on your writing goal isn’t necessarily about using all of your vacation time to sit in front of the computer screen. It’s about finding the time on the margins of your life to do what you can. Increasingly, our time is measured out in smaller and smaller increments. Let’s make use of some of those tiny slices of time.

Simplify

What is important to you? Is it keeping up with the latest television show or is it reaching your Big Writing Goal? I’m going to be presumptuous and answer with the latter.

Is your life too hectic? Caught up in gadgets and time-wasting activities? Stop taking all of those detours and get back on track. Simplify, man. And start moving ever closer to your goal.

Get Help

Sometimes you need an expert to navigate your way across unfamiliar territory. Other times, you just need to have someone riding shotgun to keep you focused and moving forward. Get the help you need in the one way possible – ask for it!

So let’s get going. What have we got to lose?

Photo courtesy of Pixomar at freedigitalphotos.net