6 Steps to More Writing Time

Today, T.C. Slonaker is here to help you with managing time while writing.

When to Write When You Don't Have Time to Write

I will never have a PhD. Not because I don't want to study for my doctorate - I love to study! - but because it should be a DPh, in alphabetical order like it should be.

So now you know about my sickness. Yes, I have been diagnosed with a mild form of OCD (which, I know, should be called CDO). It's called the "pure O," characterized only by obsessive behavior. I'm crazy, but don't necessarily need to do anything about it complain. Loudly. It drives me insane when the volume of the TV is set to a level of an odd number. But it doesn't majorly disrupt my life. Sure, when I run, I will have to run an extra mile to finish on an even number, and I must do it in an even time, but that is just minutes from my day. I don't require medication for this one.

And my dark secret? I don't really want to change. I'm okay with my obsessive behavior because sometimes it's helpful.

As my kids get older, I have accumulated more and more in my life for which I need to be on time. Therefore, I need to find the time to do it all. Along life's path, I have acquired two jobs, a few volunteer positions at church and school, a house to keep, kids to grow and manage, a few pets and a husband too.

As the kind of person who clings to the adage "A place for everything and everything in its place," I have found that less clutter in my life can make a life less cluttered. It sounds simple, doesn't it? Not when there are several other people in the house without those same convictions. Still, I press on, since it's the only way I can have control over the work I do and not let it overwhelm me.

Having less clutter in my house is one thing. Having less clutter in my schedule is another, since I can't always see it. So that's the first step in finding time in my day to write - looking at my time. 

1. Know What You're Dealing With. 

First you have to see what time you actually do have in a day. Calendars and planners are a saving grace. Without them, you spend too much time wondering what it is you aren't doing. Don't kid yourself into thinking you can keep it all straight in your mind. You can't. Something WILL get missed.

I have several types of calendars, myself.

a) Monthly calendars. These hold appointments, immovables like holidays, and just a general where the heck are we in the month? My husband usually works late during the first week of the month, so I need that reminder that dinner will be made a little later on those days. 

b) Weekly calendars. Usually just extrapolated from my monthly calendar, I can take a look at the week as a whole to see if it is jam packed or if there is a little wiggle room in which to add the "fluffy" things, like cleaning out closets or taking shopping trips. People always ask me how I can be completely done with Christmas tasks before November even hits. Effective planning, my friends.

c) Daily calendars. I have two sets of these. One is a set of "sticky notes" on my computer that hold my daily chores (such as laundry, dinner, baths, homework, soccer, etc.) - one for each day of the week. I do it on the computer so I can change as needed. When soccer season turns to basketball, changes to softball… changing is quick and easy. Then there is another set that incorporates the special events from the weekly calendar and the monthly calendar. These are all kept on my computer because that's where I will mostly easy find it.

2. Now You Can Make Your Schedule.

Once you have all those things down that you need to do, you can assign them time slots for the day. Know who you are and how you best work. Are you a morning person? Pack your morning and leave some gaps in the afternoon. Do you stay up late at night? Make your schedule go a little later. Do you routinely have appointments in the afternoon? Don't expect to use the 15 minutes between them to get anything meaningful done.

Believe it or not, my daily list is not organized by exact time, but rather by time of the day. Mornings are for getting done the "moving tasks." Exercise, errands, household chores, and grooming are the items that fit in here. Sometimes I want to get moving right away, other days I want to get the vacuuming done first. As long as it all gets done by lunch time, I'm fine. After lunch, I do the "sitting tasks." Here's where my writing fits in, as well, as work for my other job, marketing, and blogging. Once the kids start coming home from school, it's "focus on the family time" (homework, dinner, showers, sports). When the kids have gone to bed, I can do catch up work or relax.

Others might be better with an hour-specific schedule, but that's too stressful for me. Any way you choose, however, keep clocks available wherever you are working so you don't get too involved in a task.

3. Stick With the Schedule. 

Ironically, as I write this, I am off my schedule. I'm pretty sure God laughs at me when things like this happen. But since the thoughts are in my head, I must get them out. That's all I will do, however - get the thoughts out. Now is not the time to complete the entire post, or else I will not get to the next activity. And when I miss an activity, I get panicked and need to spend more time reorganizing, re-evaluating the tasks that remain, and catching up.

The point, however, is that if you get too far off schedule, you either have to re-do it or throw it out. Just like the classic Seinfeld episode at the car rental agency - "Anyone can take a reservation, but the point of the reservation is to hold the reservation." Why have a schedule if you aren't going to stick with it?

4. Don't Add What You Don't Have Room For. 

I would love to do NaNoWriMo, but I know that if I am required to fit in a certain number of words a day, I will feel defeated when I don't. And when I feel defeated, I don't get other things done either. I've had my schedule for long enough that I know about how many words I can get written in my allotted amount of time. I would need to restructure the schedule to participate in that event.

Many things may come up that really are worthy of your time, but if you can't give your whole heart to it, face it, the organizer would probably be better off with someone else. And to add something else in means restructuring the schedule. If you are doing that, you have to realize something else has to go. More re-evaluating.

5. Give Yourself a Break.

Now that I have gone all time-Nazi on you with your schedule, I'll cut you some slack. All work and no play will leave you exhausted and bitter. Schedule in some things you enjoy! If they're scheduled, you must do them. It will help you be ready to tackle the important stuff with a fresh mind.

I can't start writing until I have played a few games of Bejeweled Blitz. I reason it like this: after you collect the like gems, they disappear. It's a game of cleaning up and organizing! I don't know why, but after I have played, I feel like my brain is wide open and ready to create.

Another way of looking at giving yourself a break is not getting down on yourself when you are off schedule. I know, I know. I said, don't get off schedule. But don't quit if you slip! Start fresh the next day. Just like a diet, you won't see results if you don't stay with it.

6. When Your Life Doesn't Fit the Schedule…

There are some amazing people out there who can do it all. They have to - usually there's no choice. I'm thinking of single parents, or those trying to get an education while working full time. I was a teacher before I had children. Now, I look back at wonder how the other teachers who had children of their own ever did anything else. 

If writing is your passion, make time for it. It may mean giving up something else. It might mean less time on social media. It might mean giving up TV for a while. But if writing is what relaxes you and makes you heart happy, you won't miss what you've given up.

Once you have a schedule and work within it for a period of time, you'll be moving like well-oiled machine. Watch your word count go up, without letting the dust bunnies settle in. Who knows? You might have your Christmas cards ready to go in November too.

By T.C. Slonaker, author of Amity of the Angelmen, first of the Christian fantasy Angelmen series. Find it on the MSP Website.

One Book is as One Book Does

John W. Howell gives us a look at authors who we wish would have published more books.

One Book is as One Book Does
By John W. Howell

I was doing some research on authors who published only one book and was trying to understand some of the reasons why writers with obvious talent did not continue on to the second. The list of those who only completed one book is fairly extensive. Goodreads has a list of over fifty. I think it must be added that the books that appear on the list is a fairly impressive set of good literature. I have enjoyed a number of these authors, but not because they only wrote one book, but because the book they wrote was so outstanding. Here is a list of ten well-known: This list is courtesy of the On Line Degree Program and was published in 2010 at http://onlinedegreeprograms.com. There are other lists (I mentioned Goodreads but this one seemed pretty complete and brief. No need for a Tome Blog)

Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird

Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

Boris Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

Margaret Mitchell Gone With the Wind

Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights

Anna Sewell Black Beauty

Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar

Arundhati Roy The God of Small Things

In looking at each author more closely, the reasons are as varied as the stories; Harper Lee was not interested in writing a new book. Ralph Ellison worked on a new book but at 2000 pages it just never gelled for him and after he died the book was edited, published and titled Juneteenth. Boris Pasternak was a poet and died of lung cancer two years after Dr. Zhivago was published. Margaret Mitchell was killed crossing the street. Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one. Anna Sewell started the book at age fifty-one and died of Hepatitis five months after Black Beauty was published. Oscar Wilde was a poet and playwright and never wrote another novel. John Kennedy Toole took his own life and never got his book published while he lived. Sylva Plath took her own life after a series of emotional problems. Last but not least; Arundhati Roy has been working on screenplays and began another fictional novel in 2007. She has been very active in non-fiction and has published a number of political observations that have carried much controversy.

It appears that the main reason for not publishing another fiction book; the author passed away. So for the lack of longevity, the temporal world has not benefited from additional good works from this group. Perhaps the spiritual world has been so blessed.

John Howell writes a three times a week blog at http:/www.johnwhowell.com. His e-mail address is: johnhowell.wave@gmail.com. John writes fictional short stories and novels. His debut novel My GRL will be published by Martin Sisters Publishing.

Mining Family Letters

Selby McPhee, author of Love Crazy, tells us how it all began.

Mining Personal Letters for Love Crazy

While helping my mother and father move out of their house, in their 80s, to a retirement community, I discovered an old box of letters stashed in a closet. The box was marked in my father’s handwriting with a warning: “Personal letters of Mr. and Mrs. J. J. Fleming, Jr. (my parents) – to be destroyed unopened.” Intensely curious, but not wanting to be entirely disrespectful, I asked my father if I could take the box home and read the letters. My father, distracted by all the disruption that comes with moving, said “yes.”

When I began to read the letters, I realized that I had hit upon a gold mine in that upstairs closet. The letters, often beautifully written, offered me a personal narrative of a fabled era in American history – the madcap 1920s, the Depression and World War II – through the daily observations of Jack and Peggy Fleming, who were, incidentally, my mother and father. Those letters were the epistolary source material for my memoir, Love Crazy.

Mining family letters involves some mechanics, some moral questions, and many rewards. Since I wanted to read a chronological story of two lives, and I was working with hundreds of letters, my first task was to order the letters by year and by date and, of course, by author. I used the postmarks on the envelopes to order the letters chronologically, and the handwriting on the envelope to make a first identification of the author. I packaged the letters by year. Then, working in order of date, I transcribed the letters to word documents, reading them as I went along, and by transcribing them making them more readable in a type font, and accessible electronically, for later work.

My intention was to create not just a family record, but a work of literary nonfiction that would be of interest to any reader. In literary nonfiction (I know this because I have by now taken a bunch of writing courses), the writer uses the same techniques she would use in fiction, creating scenes, dialogue, description, narrative and reflection. 

To create dialogue, I transcribed each author separately, then read the documents alongside each other, so that I could see an exchange of letters that made a kind of dialogue between the writers, bringing their relationship to life. I had to learn when to narrate the story myself and when to quote the letters, and in narrating, I had to learn when to allow my own emotional response to the story enter in through reflection, and when to temper it. For example, the letters tell the story of the loss of my parents’ first child, a healthy newborn who developed a staph infection in the hospital in Chicago. My father tells of taking the baby’s body to be buried in a family cemetery, while my mother recuperated at home with her family in Philadelphia. When I read that, I was grief stricken and furious at my mother for leaving my father to bury that baby by himself. It seemed important that my own voice, as daughter and author, be a part of the story, but in that case I had to put my feelings at a distance from the narrative. There is, of course, a lot I don’t know about the circumstances at the time.

When the letters mentioned a book or an event, I looked it up. I read a number of books about the wars and the 1920s and the Depression, histories of the schools my parents attended, and I made pilgrimages to the houses in which they grew up, the church in which they had a priest marry them in secret, so that I could see for myself, and describe more accurately the scenes and set their story in the context of the eras in which they lived.

Then comes the moral issue I confronted and which, perhaps, every memoirist or biographer confronts. What right did I have to read the letters saved in an old box marked with the directive that the box be destroyed unopened? 

I dreamed recently that my father came for a visit, old and frail, and I asked everyone who might speak to him NOT to mention the book. I hid a box of copies in a junk room, camouflaged, and before the dream ended I was trying to get to the kitchen to hide another copy of the book before he noticed it. The dream obviously speaks to my guilt about exposing my parents, telling their story from my perspective, not theirs. I would rather be in control of my own story, but I fully understand that if my children were to write a book about us, they would put their own spin on it, and I might not like everything they say. 

The counter question is, why did my parents save all those letters, leaving them for future generations? Why DO people save letters? So they can go back and read them? Because they are a record of a life that is not yet over? Or do they save them for us?

I think my mother would rather have told her own story. I have a little notebook in which she listed major events through the decades, in preparation for what I believe she hoped would be her own memoir. She might have skipped the account of their persistent money problems, their volatile marriage, and her own mental instability, all of which I found important to relate, as it made a madcap romance into a genuine human experience that informed the dynamics of our family today. I think my father, who to the end remained so besotted with my mother and yearning for her approval, would rather have kept their story to themselves. 

As I wrote in the beginning of Love Crazy, I wanted to read my parents letters in part because, growing up, I had a persistent feeling that I had missed the party, that I was an afterthought, born when my parents were in their forties and my brother was almost grown up. By taking control of the material, of the story, I have put myself into it, and that was a gift for me. I also wanted to examine the degree to which we are all shaped by our family histories, and from that what I would learn about myself. But most of all, I have come to know my parents not just with that particular lens of an adult child, with all the stored up memories and family dynamics, good and bad, but as a more dispassionate observer young couple full of dreams, who had bad luck and hard times, and I feel enormous compassion for them, and gratitude, as a daughter, for all they did, and all the courage it took, to get up and keep going.

Find out more about Love Crazy.

Find out more about Selby McPhee.
 

The Power of the Thriller

“I’ll be back.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line from the iconic thriller, The Terminator.  The movie was directed by another icon, James Cameron.  The Terminator had all the essential ingredients: good acting, action packed, clever concept, but… it didn’t make sense.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved the movie.  It remains one of my favorites.  However, when I left the theater after seeing it for the first time, I wondered about one minor inconsistency.  Well, it was a major inconsistency, but most people have overlooked it so I guess it didn’t matter too much.  So, okay, maybe a ‘minor’ inconsistency. 

You have this future civilization dominated by machines and run by a supercomputer.  Impressive war machines were slowly killing humans.  Cyborgs, indistinguishable from humans, but vastly more powerful, infiltrated into the human ranks to kill a few humans in one subterranean hovel or another.  With all this evil capability and seemingly endless funds, why didn’t the computer simply develop a pathogen to kill off the remainder of the humans?  Germ warfare, an obvious solution!  It’s doubtful the machine civilization would worry too much about the Geneva Conventions. 

Simply infect a few prisoners and send them back home.  In those ‘caves’ the disease would have spread faster than wild fires in a drought-ridden forest.  There wouldn’t be any disease control in the enclaves to either stop the spread or handle the patients.  Such an attack would have been more thorough, cheaper, quicker, safer… machines aren’t susceptible to biological diseases but they could be shot down by humans.

That this super intelligent machine didn’t realize such a simple solution has always bothered me.  Most thrillers are fun, like a roller-coaster ride.  If you allow your mind to simply ignore the impossible and forgive the implausible, they can be enjoyable. 

The best thrillers are closest to reality.  What made another James Cameron movie, Halloween, such a mega-hit was its believability.  Michael Meyers, the unstoppable serial killer, didn’t have to suspend the natural laws to frighten you and that made the movie all the more frightening.  

My own ‘thriller’ novel, Reap the Whirlwind, falls into the latter category.  In this novel, a young writer’s bank account is deep in the red due to a check he never wrote.  Friends who can help him mysteriously die or disappear.   Someone using a computer is destroying his life.  But, why?  As the story progresses, a threat to all mankind emerges, such that the anguish and fears of one man become the collective fears of an entire species.  What makes this story even more frightening than Halloween is that not only could these events happen, but they may already be happening. 

Hmm… Maybe I’ll contact Cameron and find out if he wants to produce another ‘real’ thriller.

Robert Sells, author of Return of the White Deer and Reap the Whirlwind