The Hard Choices, part 1

I had to make some real­ly hard choic­es last month.

This is some­where between a per­son­al update and a process arti­cle, but all writ­ers have to grap­ple with the cold real­i­ty of time man­age­ment at some point or anoth­er. I can’t tell you how to make your own decisions—maybe you pri­or­i­tize fam­i­ly or career over writing—but I can tell you you will even­tu­al­ly MAKE them.

And I can try to show you how I walked through mine.Last month, I spent sev­er­al days decid­ing how much of my cur­rent life I need to stop show­ing up for. Writ­ing is too impor­tant to me to give up (or to rel­e­gate to a side quest), but how would I make the time for it? Do I abdi­cate from some of the help I’ve giv­en Rhap­sody with Tre­ble and Clef? Do I drop some or all of the four units I’m tak­ing to bol­ster my per­son­al train­ing resume? Do I stop run­ning? Do I stop attend­ing the UU Church where I have begun to form a few threads of com­mu­ni­ty that I can serve in my capac­i­ty as a pagan priest? Where do I find the cuts that will leave me enough time? 

Par­tic­u­lar­ly time to write. 

If you’re writ­ing AS a full-time job—or if you want to be—it prob­a­bly takes you full-time-job amounts of time to get the writ­ing done that you need to. One of the strangest mis­con­cep­tions writ­ers seem to labor under about mak­ing mon­ey writ­ing (one that I am con­stant­ly call­ing out here) is that one can make Full Time Salary™ with Week­end War­rior™ effort. You can get pub­lished. You can fin­ish your book. You can PUBLISH your book. You can get paid—maybe even enough to pay a bill every month with the fruits of your word­smith­ery labor. But you won’t be tak­ing sum­mers in the French Riv­iera if you don’t work hard and almost every day. If you’re a house­hold name, you might be able to rest on your lau­rels for a few years mak­ing asyn­chro­nous income, but I fuck­ing PROMISE you that you also did­n’t get to be a house­hold name by work­ing ten hours a week.

And let me tell you, when you’re not writ­ing full-time, oth­er stuff seeps in. (And, of course, though I tell this as a cau­tion­ary tale and for the sake of trans­paren­cy in my process, I should point out that by “you,” I mean ME….but I prob­a­bly also mean you, so be care­ful.) I nev­er stopped writ­ing every day (anoth­er drum I bang all the time), but boy did I drop off of try­ing to get posts up and sit down for ten to twelve hours and edit and do all the hard work of the space in between writ­ing for plea­sure and pub­li­ca­tion. I just made sure I was keep­ing the habit so that the tools of process (and maybe a few tools of craft) would still be wait­ing for me when I came back. 

Most are. 

A few are stiff and rusty. 

A cou­ple I’m going to have to start over on. 

It could be worse. And if I had­n’t writ­ten every day, it WOULD be worse. And if I’d writ­ten more, it would be bet­ter, but that’s where your own life bal­ance and pri­or­i­ties come in. I was­n’t will­ing to tell some­one I loved (going through the worst thing they’d ever been through in their life) that they need­ed to find some­one else to talk to about it. Maybe you make dif­fer­ent choic­es.

Now…..I am all too well aware that I have been writ­ing a long line of “Here’s what went wrong in the LAST few months…” posts span­ning all the way back to 2021. Mis­car­riages. Can­cer. Ter­ri­ble breakups. Liv­er dis­ease. Death of boss-friends. Evic­tions. Debil­i­tat­ing chron­ic pain. Mul­ti­ple surg­eries and recovery—both me and Rhap­sody. Tons of pain and anx­i­ety. I don’t want to bore you with anoth­er post like that. In the words of Mrs. Land­ing­ham: “So you’re hav­ing a lit­tle bit of a decade.“

And it was­n’t all bad. In there I fell in love a cou­ple of times and took some trips and got to piv­ot com­plete­ly on my career by going back to school for a year to get a cer­tifi­cate. 

But in that time of writ­ing much much less, oth­er stuff oozed into all the cracks…and not in the fun way. 

It was­n’t like I ever said, “Hey, I’m going to do this oth­er thing instead of get­ting back to writ­ing.”

[Okay, actu­al­ly, that’s not true. There was that year of com­mu­ni­ty col­lege where I very delib­er­ate­ly said, “I don’t want to take three years to become a cer­ti­fied per­son­al train­er, so I’m going to do this all in one year even if it eats up some my writ­ing time—which holy hells did it ever.]

But oth­er than that very minor incident—hardly worth men­tion­ing really—with the nine months off, I did­n’t ever delib­er­ate­ly sac­ri­fice my writ­ing time to oth­er things. It was­n’t like I was mak­ing a choice. It just sort of hap­pened. I took on minor things in the cracks and cran­nies, since I was doing a lot less writ­ing any­way. A com­mit­ment here. A diver­sion there. A week­ly hike. A dai­ly run. “Yeah, I can take the kids to school every morn­ing.” “Sure, I can help out with that.” A sense of how much I could put on my plate that was­n’t based on need­ing hours a day to write.

One more thing. 

One more thing.

One more thing.

Most­ly I was sick or in sup­port mode…or some­times both. Hos­pi­tal­ized. Doing chores. Run­ning errands. Help­ing process grief or chron­ic pain. And it was­n’t all bad either—sometimes I watched Dare­dev­il because Rhap­sody was tired of Love Is Blind and we were both home. Stuff just kind of drib­bled into my sched­ule and once it got in there, it became VERY hard to get it back out. In the last year, I repeat­ed­ly noticed that on days where I want­ed to write—where I was real­ly excit­ed about it—but there just was­n’t time. I was run­ning from thing to thing to thing and then my day would end. And every week I said “Okay, I’m going to be bet­ter on the week­end when I have time.” And every week­end I would run ragged after the kids and say, “Okay, I’m going to be bet­ter dur­ing the week when the kids are gone and I have a rou­tine.” 

Months of this.

And loved ones…. Loved ones. Oh dear sweet loved ones. They ARE loved—and they love you, I promise—but they can smell free time like a shark with a drop of blood. And if you’re not wrap­ping your arms around that time, declar­ing it writ­ing time instead of “free” time, and growl­ing at them when they get close, like Roc­co when you reach towards his bowl for that bacon the kids slipped him…you’re going to have that pre­cious time tak­en away by the most well-inten­tioned, well-mean­ing, deeply-lov­ing, sin­cere peo­ple in your lives who just don’t under­stand why it is that you can’t do this ONE thing for them dur­ing all that “free” time you have. 

Sud­den­ly, I’m ready to write and champ­ing at the bit to write and hump­ing the WALLS to write, and my sched­ule is say­ing, “When, Chris? When would this writ­ing hap­pen?”

I’m a writer. I write. I have to write. If I don’t write, it feels like a part of me is bro­ken. So find­ing the time I’d lost to so many oth­er things was the high­est pri­or­i­ty of Feb­ru­ary, and I would­n’t rest until I fig­ured it out. I know a lot of peo­ple talk about writ­ing in these terms, but when you take a look at their actu­al lives, they don’t get much writ­ing done. And I was about to be one of those peo­ple, speak­ing in florid, pur­ple prose about how much I loved writ­ing while doing lit­tle of it.

And so I took to my sched­ule. Every reclaimed hour its own bat­tle of wills and Tetris’ed logis­tics. 

I’m not going to tell you what mat­ters in your own life or what might be more impor­tant than writ­ing in a moment or in a week or in a month or in a year. That’s for you to decide. I’ve heard peo­ple tell me there’s no time to write when they play 8 hours of video games a day, and they’re clear­ly kid­ding them­selves, and I’ve seen peo­ple keep at it every day but the sched­uled date of their own abdom­i­nal surgery and they’re clear­ly more ded­i­cat­ed than me. Most every­thing else is in the lim­i­nal space between those two extremes, and I’m not here to judge what makes a “real” writer. Real is some­one who writes.

What I can tell you is that if you’re not writ­ing daily—or very very close to it—you prob­a­bly won’t be able to quit your day job. And that on a long enough time­line, your pri­or­i­ties WILL become self-evi­dent.

If you write rough­ly a page a day for 20 years—which is a rea­son­able pace for well revised and edit­ed work—and take a year off to help a loved one through can­cer, your body of work will be 6935 pages instead of 7200.

If, on the oth­er hand, you let pay­check-earn­ing work, fam­i­ly, and leisure time take prece­dence (and I’m not say­ing you shouldn’t—we all live life accord­ing to our val­ues and pri­or­i­ties), and only man­age to come to the page six or sev­en week­ends a year, and write the same page every day, then your body of work in the same 20 years will be only 240 pages. 

At the begin­ning of Feb­ru­ary, I hit a cri­sis point. There just was­n’t enough time for all of it and I HAD to write. I tried to add writ­ing and four units into my already-busy sched­ule and the whole thing col­lapsed like a lung in a med­ical dra­ma. And I had to have my Com­ing to Jesus The Mor­ri­g­an moment.

OKAY SO WHAT WERE THE ACTUAL CHOICES???

On to part 2 

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

If you’re enjoy­ing this blog, and would like to see more arti­cles like this one, the writer is a guy with rent and insur­ance to pay who would love to spend more time writ­ing. Please con­sid­er con­tribut­ing to my Patre­on. As lit­tle as $3/month (less-than-a-lat­te a month) will get you in on backchan­nel con­ver­sa­tions, patron-only polls, and my spe­cial ear when I ask for advice about future projects or blog changes.

Or if a one-time dona­tion (or some type of non-mon­e­tary dona­tion) is more your speed, I have a Tip Jar with all the ways to help.