Prioritising Writing in a Messy life

This week I was going to write about treating writing as your job, and prioritising it as such and then:

My mother-in-law broke her hip and we spent the week queueing in A&E, transferring to a different hospital and waiting for results in the hospital canteen (she’s fine now, thank you NHS)

My son arrived from Australia (yay)

We had a big family reunion during which there was a massive row and

Builders came to repair our rotten balcony

Ahhh life.

But even when things are calm, it’s not always easy to prioritise writing.

It’s partly linked to income. Because we don’t earn loads, most writers have other jobs. Even if we do write/illustrate fulltime, we often work from home so we’re always the one in a position to put a wash on, nip to Tesco, take a parcel for a neighbour, look after a sick child off school, bung a jacket potato in the oven.

The unreliability of the publishing industry makes it tempting to tell ourselves that our work isn’t important. We can spend six months writing a book that is never taken: so that’s six months of no income, no pension. That does make it difficult to justify to ourselves or to a partner that we need another six months to write a new thing that also might not be taken.

Maybe there’s an additional element of writing for children? There’s a perception that writing for children is easy and fun and I do think many, many people see it as hobby, almost as if we shouldn’t be paid for it, or shouldn’t be business-like about it.

How do we put our writing first?

I know writers who are very good at properly prioritising it; who go to their desk every day and turn off their internet or phone and write. I hugely admire that ethic but I can’t do that. My life is too messy to carve out a set time. If your life is messy too, here is my advice…

Lower your Expectations

Yes, I know that sounds mad but do not set unachievable goals for yourself and then beat yourself up about not reaching them. Remember:

Even a tiny bit of writing is progress. If you only wrote 300 words a day, every day, in just over three months you would have the rough draft of a 30k book.

There are many steps to writing a book and not all of them involve typing. Listening to the radio, walking, reading social media, chatting, imagining can all inspire ideas and are thus part of the job of being a writer. So …

Incorporate writing into your messy life

I practise what let’s call ‘mindful working when not working’ (catchy title!). It means that I actively think about my book while doing other jobs. If I go to the supermarket, I imagine what my character would buy. If I’m queuing in a post office, yes my body is stuck but my mind is free to think through a plot point or tell myself the story of my book. I hold my story, my characters, my world in my head all the time I’m walking from job to job or putting a wash on or during any mindless task.

Exploit others

If I’m looking after kids, I ruthlessly exploit them to help me with my book. I often do craft with kids anyway so when my kids were little, if I was writing a book about a hairdresser, we’d do hairdresser play (thank you, playdough hair salon, you inspired many plots). I got my kids to draw pictures of hair, think up stories about hair, do role plays about hair. Kids can come up with amazing things, really off-the-wall lateral stuff. So whatever you are writing about: cars, space, monsters, robots; get the kids to build train tracks or tower blocks in your world, or do role plays with toys. It leads to all kinds of great content. My The Mummy Shop book came directly out of a game I played with my kids.

Illustrated by Lauren Beard

Adults also have fantastic stories. Anyone who start with ‘omg you’ll never believe what happened…’ is a very useful friend, which brings me to…

Observe

All those people I see in post office queues or A&E waiting rooms become excellent fodder for my stories. I’m a big eavesdropper. A weird way someone describes something or a strange story they tell is all useful research and development for your book. If you want a brilliant example of someone who’s fantastic at watching life and making it into art, have a look at AlexTSmith. His Pigeon Post substack and his ‘my week in little boxes’ are beautifully captured words and imagery about everyday life. Stories are about people and so use your ‘chores time’ to gather snippets you’ll add into books later.

Grab any chance you have

I always have a notebook with me and I’m really good at saying ‘I’ve got a spare 5 minutes, I’ll write something’. I’ve written in softplay cafes, on buses, in supermarket carparks and last week, in the hospital canteen.

Working in the hospital canteen

When I had a proper job I wrote on my commute, and in my lunch hour, because even 300 words a day will add up to a book.

Distance is an important part of the process

Sometimes I’ll have a patch of free time and will binge-write like a maniac, then something unexpected happens and life gets in the way again. That can be really frustrating. BUT distance is good. It helps to have time and space away from your book, to let the words stew a bit. It makes it easier to stand back and see what’s not working, to see the shape of the story rather than the individual sentence-level work.

Educate the people around you

I have had to say in very clear terms that me ‘sitting in bed with a cup of tea, reading’ is in fact required research and development. (It really is). If I have a deadline I have boundaried my kids quite strictly ‘I will set up this train track for you but I am going to be working just over here and you must play on your own’. Kids do understand this. They learn to play independently and become creative problem-solvers if I’m not there to fix everything or explain everything. So let go of ‘bad parent’ guilt around this. Both my kids have grown up to be ‘project people’ who are confident to work alone and who are brilliant at finding solutions.

Give yourself a break

You can’t be efficient all the time. Sometimes you need to stop and remind yourself that writing is just a job. It’s not your whole identity. You are more than that.

In other jobs we’d get sick leave or paid holiday time. I work every day if I can, weekends and bank holidays too. Overall, I do get enough writing done.

When I got back from the hospital last Thursday, I was way too exhausted to write so I made a cup of tea, lit the fire (it was randomly freezing in JUNE) and watched the final of Interior Design Masters. Then I got an idea from something one of the contestants said.

You see: ‘mindful working when not working’. It’s really going to catch on.