One of the biggest obstacles to completing a novel (or perhaps, for some, starting one) is finding the time for such lofty pursuits. Surely a sign of privilege is time spent writing stuff that perhaps will never be read, but our privileged lives are also filled with stresses and obligations that pull us in every direction but the one that fixes us to the desk and allows us to escape into our creative minds.
More often than not, I find it takes a while before I can get back into 'the zone' when I sit down at the keyboard and play the right music and seek to calm myself and disconnect from everything else going on in my head. Writing may be cathartic, but that zone is a mental destination that waits on the other side of procrastination, demotivation, and a general feeling of being overwhelmed.
Many of you will know, of course, that I have Temple Dark Books to run, and I can assure you that's no easy feat. From submissions to editing and proofreading, formatting and typesetting, I get only one aspect of this company's output and obligations done. There's also all the social media and other promo and marketing material (design and output), the sales and distribution networking and logistics, attending conventions and trade meetings, doing the company bookkeeping, liaising with artists and cover designers...how am I supposed to write a novel with all this going on?
Oh, and did I tell you that's all apart from my full-time job?
Luckily, there are times when the simple act of beginning to write seems to remind my busy brain that there's creativity afoot. And there I am, back in my science fantasy universe where all is right and it all feels worthwhile. It's terribly important to treat your writing as a job - if even just a part-time one - whereby a specific time of the day and a specific duration is alloted to it. Often, the motor function of writing (whether physical or its psychological equivalent) triggers me and propels me towards a place of comfortable obliviousness where the world is left behind.
I keep notes, of course, but someone recently asked me where I kept them and was surprised to hear that I keep them in the novel(s) I'm writing, positioned at the point in the story at which they'll become useful and relevant. This often involves moving chunks of text around as I complete a chapter or sequence (a collection of scenes focusing on a particular unfolding of plot), but it means for me that I'll never lose sticky notes or have important things pushed so far down a to-do list that I never again find them.
There's always so much going on in my head that the ideas fly so fast and I have to capture them - I'm sure all you writers have jumped out of bed at 2am to scribble something down (if you don't, you'll never get asleep). I tend to email myself (from one address to the other) so that unread emails draw my attention the next day - or whenever I get around to it. Keeping the same subject line in multiple emails means I can call them up in a search.
The notes also belong to multiple novels at this stage - I'm working on Book 4 but scenes are written across Books 5-7 and I've notes in those files too! When you're working on something so big and interconnected, there are consequences to big ideas that go beyond the scene or chapter or book you're currently writing. I'm beginning to think my process reflects my overactive mind, always reaching in different directions and not content to focus on one thing for too long. This is certainly how it would look to anyone who could see one of my novels in progress - as the mood or inspiration takes me, I move around the book fleshing out plots or exploring character arcs, all with the knowledge that it's happening within a larger framework. The advantage to this approach - for me, anyway - is that when I hit a creative wall in any given sequence, I can go to a different planet or character or species and see what they're up to. I'm bound to have left them hanging somewhere.
So, after all this, how do I find the time to write my novel? I've absolutely no idea. And what, I hear you ask, are you doing writing a blog post when you should be writing your novel? I hear you. What, indeed?
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