A Day Off to Write by Andy Scheer

If your employer granted you a day off—eight full hours—to work on your writing project, what could you accomplish?

Can't happen? What about yesterday? You say you had plans for Memorial Day. Then what about the next federal holiday.

As I write this, it's not quite noon. Besides catching up on emails and writing this, I've created a 500-word draft for a magazine piece due Saturday. After lunch I plan to dig into some reference material for a project I've been putting off. And now I have twenty free minutes to write this.

I came to the keyboard this morning with a fair idea of what I would write. I awoke this past Saturday at 4:00 a.m., my mind filled with ideas for the magazine piece. Fifteen minutes later, after recording my ideas, I tried to get back to sleep. But I kept thinking about what I'd post here on May 28. So I trudged to my office with another scrap of paper and logged some ideas.

My writing usually comes in three phases: stewing, jotting ideas, and keyboarding. All are essential, even if I have the luxury of eight straight hours.

This points me to the strategy I learned from Dr. Dennis Henley: If you want time to write, make it. He suggests setting aside two hours for writing each weeknight—four TV sitcoms or two dramas worth of time. At the end of a month, you'll have put in a full 40 hours of writing. At the end of a year, 480 hours or one dozen 40-hour workweeks—three months worth.

Today I might not invest the full afternoon in writing. I've also been putting off a few handyman projects. But while I accomplish those, I can still be planning my time at the keyboard.

Screen Test by Terry Burns

 

The seduction of the screen.

No, I’m not talking about the movies.

It seems like I spend most of my life looking at a screen. It’s how I work incoming and outgoing submissions, communicate with clients and editors, research markets . . . in short it’s how I work.


But then there’s social media that I have to participate in for the sake of visibility and name identification. There are hundreds of emails coming in demanding my attention. Time to pay the bills? Look at the screen. Get some rare time to write? Look at the screen.

Taking time away from the computer? Watch the big screen across the room for a movie or some football. Need to know what’s going on in the world? I don’t read the newspaper anymore, I get my news from TV news or online. Watch the screen. Even if I am watching the big screen the computer is pushed aside on an airdesk and the sound of a message coming in or other alert can pull me right back.

Make a phone call? Much smaller screen, but can do email and facebook there too. Now the screen is actually attached to my body if I am out and around. I just had a computer meltdown and was without it for several days. That should have been a relaxing respite but it wasn’t. I was stressing over getting it back up and the things I was supposed to be doing and wasn’t.

How much is too much? When things are competing for my time it is often one type of screen competing with another. I know it is a constant problem for writers trying to carve out writing time and balance it with other aspects of their life. I’m just the opposite, trying to carve out time away from the screens.

How about you, what’s your relationship with the screens in your life?

Writing distractions by Terry Burns

I've gotten enough of the negative campaigning by both political parties, name-calling, half truths, inuenndos and outright lies. I said something about it online, and then wrote a personal blog on it on my website. I want the character assassination to stop and for them to get down to talking about issues . . . how they are going to fix this country.One lady agreed with me, then went on to say that Republicans should wear white hoods so we would know them for what they are. Oh yeah, she got what I was saying.

But my purpose here is not to get political on a literary site. The point I am leading up to is all this has me very distracted. At the Oregon Christian Writer's Conference we were talking about writing time, and one of the biggest thieves of this time is distractions.

I've heard it all of my writing life. "When the kids grow up and move out I'll have time to write."

"When I retire I'll have plenty of time to write."

"When I finish doing (insert big project here) I'll have lots of time to write."

There is never time to write. We don't have it now, and we aren't going to magically have it down the road when some big life change event happens. Life expands to fill available time. Writing time has to be carved out of whatever we are doing at the time and jealously protected. That can be difficult if those in our life haven't "gotten it" yet and aren't helping us to do it. If we aren't getting that support at home we have to take steps to get those closest to us to see that we are serious about our writing, that it isn't just our newest hobby.

I've been lucky. The two people closest to me in my life 'got it.' Mom was the one that really pushed me to write in the first place and was my biggest supporter. I'm so happy she got to see me achieve some measure of success at it before she passed away. My wife, Saundra, is the strongest supporter a man could want. Both of them not only would help me carve out the writing time, but would get on me if I wasn't doing it.

These days writing has to a large extent given way to working as an agent, spending my time trying to get the work of my clients out instead of writing myself. I still get to write some but for the most part my focus has changed. But I still have to work to carve out the time for it because life is still there, still expanding to fill my time, and distractions are still rampant, like social networking . . . and political campaigns.