Time Slips By So Easily.

On 7 June, I blogged about procrastination; probably the writer’s biggest barrier to success. In that post, I mentioned I was keeping a chart to log my activities and see where I really spent my time. That time chart ended when I’d completed it for 68 days. Why 68 days? I just felt I’d acquired enough data for the purpose and that it was time to evaluate it.

The first shock came when I realised how little time I devoted to actual writing-related activity. I have a part time ‘day’ job that allows me to put food into the mouths of my family and keep a reasonable roof over our heads. In common with 98% of writers, I have yet to reach the stage where my writing can support rather than supplement. The day job, including attendance and travel time, takes up about 25 hours per week.

Here’s the table of results I gathered:

                                                                                                Hours   Per cent

68 days                                                                                    1632    100%

Sleep (about 7 hours per night)                                                   476      29%

Domestic (eating, shopping, home maintenance, personal stuff,)   336      21%

Office (attendance & travel to day job)                                       239      15%

Relaxation (TV, music, films etc)                                                 189      12%

Marketing (FB, Blog, Twitter, Pinterest,)                                       89        5%

Emails (everything that’s not Twitter or Pinterest)                           74        5%

Fitness (walks, bike rides, rests)                                                    66        4%

Reading (novels, magazines & other books)                                   52        3%

Editing (editing, formatting, submissions)                                 38        2%

Artist (morning pages, photography, drawing)                                37        2%

Technical (computer updates, security, internet research)               20        1%

Writing (short stories, blog posts, reviews)                              16        1%

                                                           

We go through life making certain assumptions. I style myself a ‘writer’; it’s how I visualise myself, how I aim to lead my life. It came as a shock to discover how little time I’d spent in actually writing. A salutary lesson, and one I’ve taken to heart already. I’d persuaded myself I spent much of my time in front of the keyboard and screen actually placing words in documents to produce new writing. If I tell you that the time chart revealed that I spent no more than 5%, that’s FIVE per cent, of my available writing time in actually writing, I think you’ll understand my shock and dismay.

This is the modified version of the table as it relates to writing activity:

Marketing (FB, Blog, Twitter, Pinterest,)               89        27%

Emails (everything that’s not Twitter or Pinterest)  74        23%

Reading (novels, mags & other books)                 52        16%

Editing (editing, formatting, submissions)       38        12%

Artist (morning pages, photography, drawing)      37        11%

Technical (comp updates, security, int research)   20        6%

Writing (short stories, blog posts, reviews)     16        5%

Total time for writing activities (34 hours per week) 326      20%

(sorry the tables aren't aligned - Blogger uses different code from MS Word and I'm damned if I know how to correct this!)

So, my total working week involves 59 hours; hardly that of a sluggard, I think.

I was completing Julia Cameron’s course, The Artist’s Way, at the start of the measuring period; in fact the course was a material influence on my decision to carry out the assessment. So, thank you, Julia! She suggests a series of writing exercises, called ‘morning pages’ and also says all creatives should make an artist’s date with themselves for at least 2 hours per week, which is why those activitiesare included in the table.

I don’t need to explain the rest; it’s patently obvious. But it seems I had fallen into that trap so much lauded on the internet by various groups, organisations and ‘experts’: A writer must develop an ‘Author Platform’ on the web in order to become visible.

Most of my valuable writing time had been spent in building that platform, using social media such as Twitter(3,570 followers), Facebook Author page (244 ‘likes’), Facebook itself  (1,524 friends), Goodreads (1,491 friends), LinkedIn(1,926 connections),  and, more recently, Pinterest (278 followers). The activity to sustain a presence on these sites is time-consuming and some, especially Pinterest, can be addictive (be warned!). Had this time resulted in substantial book sales? The simple answer is, ‘NO’. Add to this, my other activities on such sites as Digg, a site under significant re-development, StumbleUpon (242 connections), and Klout a system intended to measure influence on the web, but one I find confusing and not at all user friendly, and where I have a score of 50 (the average is 20, apparently).  I’m also involved in Foursquare (12 friends) and Tripadvisor (970 friends). Enough said!

So, to the outcome. It’s always been my aim to write something new every day. Not always easy, as I have to rise at 06:30 Monday to Wednesday in order to get to the day job on time, and mornings are by far my most creatively productive times. I suffered from ME for 8 years and am still in the recovery phase, so I need to rest after physical activity, and that includes attendance at the office. So, I’m occasionally restricted. But that’s no excuse for not writing as a priority. What’s happened is that priorities have become distorted by activity undertaken to build a presence on the web.

The solution?

I’ve developed a new time chart, measuring only those activities to do with writing, so that I can keep a constant eye on where my time goes. I’ve decided, and this post is an example, to make writing my first activity every day that I enter my study. So far today I haven’t looked at my emails and my only activity online has been to obtain links for this post. Will the discipline, combined with a new awareness, allow me to spend more time on those writing activities that really matter: creating, editing, submitting and reading? Only time will tell. And I’ll let you know in a couple of months how I’m getting on. I invite you to undertake a similar assessment and see whether you’re using your available time to best advantage. It might surprise, shock or delight you; who knows?

Those uninterested in the technical aspects of the exercise can stop here. For those who want to emulate the process, however, please read on:

I’d set up my time chart on MS Excel, with columns for date, activity name, activity code, start time, end time and, using a simple formula, time spent. This allowed me to modify the spread sheet so that I could create totals for each of the specific tasks I’d nominated. I had headings to cover Domestic, Office, Marketing, Email, Fitness, Reading, Editing, Artist, Technical and Writing. These were ‘group’ headings that allowed me to include all those various jobs we undertake in our daily lives. I’ve attached a sample below to indicate what this actually looked like. If you decide to do something similar, and I strongly advise you to do so, this might act as a guide for you.

I’m no expert with MS Excel, so it took me a little time to understand how I could use formulae to work out how much total time had been spent on each of the specified tasks. But the Help menu actually came to the rescue on this occasion (it appears that, when trying to total ‘time’ the straightforward ∑ autosum function won’t work, it merely returns a value that states a time of day. To arrive at the total time, you use ∑autosum and then right click on the cell where the total will be created, select ‘format cells’ then ‘custom’ from the drop down ‘number’ list and pick ‘[h]:mm:ss’ from the list presented.  I hope that helps!

Dissecting and evaluating the data was a little tedious, but worth the effort, I think. And here’s the promised sample of my original spread sheet.  Good luck.

Related articles

• Procrastination Is The Thief of Time
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Procrastination Is The Thief of Time

This small nugget of wisdom flowed from the pen, or quill, of Edward Young, an English poet and dramatist. It comes from his work, Night Thoughts, written 1742-5.

In spite of the age of the quote, it is as apposite and relevant today as it ever was, possibly more so. Today, we are beset by so many more distractions stemming from the things with which we surround ourselves.

I don’t know about you, but I love the act of writing, the process of those words flowing from the ether via my brain and fingers to the keyboard. I love it. So, why do I put off the moment when I should start? Why do I find so many other things to do rather than engage in a pastime that I love?

It’s irrational, isn’t it? And I pride myself on being rational. But, perhaps this is the issue. Writing isn’t generally a rational process, especially if writing fiction, which is my favourite genre. Writing fiction requires an engagement with a level of fantasy, mixed with elements of reality, of course. But that necessity to dwell in the world of fantasy removes the writer from the rational world. And, perhaps, it is the need for this move into the creative sphere that allows the writer to lose sight of the need for discipline.

Creativity is a delicate affair. It’s necessarily subject to influences beyond the reasoning mind. An engineer, that most grounded of imaginers, can create a working machine that depends on the laws of physics and the use of pragmatism, but the leap of faith that raises a standard machine to the level of brilliant invention depends almost entirely on intuition. For those of us who are artists, in all fields, imagination is the prime driver of our creations. So, it’s hardly surprising that we can be deflected from the work of exercising that difficult to define aspect of ourselves by qualities that are more easily identified. What I’m saying here is that when we create, we take risks, and human beings are generally resistant to risk. We risk being made to look foolish in the eyes of our peers, and, more importantly, being made ridiculous in our own eyes.

So, we engage in activities we can rely on, activities that require little risk. I find myself drawn to answering emails, engaging in social chat on Facebook, promoting various stories via Digg, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn. I will respond to those connections made via Pinterest (there’s an addictive social grouping if ever there was one). And whilst I’m able to convince myself that this activity has some value in that it spreads my name wider and increases my online visibility, I know deep down that I am merely putting off the moment when I must put my fingers to the keyboard and produce some new combinations of frequently used words. I have no real grounds for fear in this regard: I am frequently able to sit down and produce a story with absolutely no planning. So, I have no experience of being blocked to prevent my getting on with it. Similarly, I seem to be able to draw ideas from the ether so that I am rarely short of things to write about. So, what stops me from actually getting on with it?

I think part of it comes from a perceived need to start with a clear desk: I hate clutter, both material and intellectual. So, I’ll find excuses to clear actual objects - writing magazines awaiting responses to articles, details of writing contests to transfer to my Writing Contests page on this blog, unanswered emails that require a considered response, messages on social sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. I pretend I have a need to clear these items before I’ll be ‘ready’ to do some writing. This is so, even though experience tells me I can get out of bed, sit down at the keyboard and write straight away, regardless of ‘stuff’ piled on my desk or in my Inbox.

So, is it laziness? Is my subconscious just playing games with me and pretending it doesn’t want to do the work, kidding me that the other stuff is more important?

No, I think it’s almost entirely a combination of discipline, or the lack of it, and organisation, or the lack of that as well. Because of this, I’ve developed a Time Chart in which I’m recording the time I spend on each task during the day. I hope this will show me just how much of my time is spent doing things I really don’t need to do. I have always held that the most precious resource we have is time. If I discover I’m wasting that one thing we can never recover or replace, I expect it to have a salutary effect on my behaviour. I’ll let you know the outcome of my little experiment.

In the meantime, I invite you to think about how you procrastinate and what things get in the way of actually creating. Please share your experiences and thoughts in the comments space below. You know you want to; after all, it’s a way of putting off that moment when you’ll have to face keyboard or pen and paper and actually construct sentences with words, building paragraphs and finally chapters and, maybe, even a novel!

Related articles

• The Dangers of Distraction.

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• Procrastination Perfectionism - Are you going to let those two words get the better of you?

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• On Procrastination

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• Top Six Ways to Procrastinate as a Writer

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The Challenge for Writers.

Allerthorpe Woods.

For those of us who like, want, need or are compelled to express ourselves in writing there are a number of challenges to be faced. These vary according to the nature of the writer and the type of writing pursued.

So, if you're a writer, what are your challenges?

I'll start you off with my own.

My most basic challenge is one I impose on myself by a quirk of personality: I feel strongly about many topics; passionate, even. But I used to allow this strong emotion to overwhelm my writing, so that I became a proselytising missionary, spreading my beliefs and opinions at the expense of readability.

I prefer to write fiction, being a natural teller of tales, rather than an essayist, but my need to teach and preach (I should point out here that I'm a committed agnostic who views all organised religion with suspicion - there I go again, you see?) overwhelmed my story telling and turned my work into thinly-disguised evangelical tracts on one subject or another. Of course, this isn't attractive to readers. Why would it be? I mean, who cares what I think? Readers are looking primarily for entertainment. If they want to be harangued or beaten about the brain with someone's opinion, they'll go the local debating society, attend a political rally, visit a church or join some society or other. What they want from novels is story.

So, what to do about this unattractive habit of mine? Well, I wondered if I might dilute the urge to put the world right by allowing myself the luxury of joining serious debates taking place elsewhere, thus allowing that part of my brain to feel it's had its say. That way, perhaps, I could then write instead of 'right', if you see what I mean. So, I've become a member of Digg, StumbleUpon, AllVoices and the Huffington Post sites. Here I can indulge my missionary self whenever I feel the urge to attack some injustice that heats my blood. And there are many, I can tell you. I've always loathed injustice in every form. I also hate hypocrisy, and lies, and conflict politics, and waste, and environmental denial, and religious dogma and brainwashing of children and… well, you see where I'm going with this, don't you? But, by joining these arenas for serious debate, I can get the frustration out of my system and leave my imagination free to tell stories without reference to the passion of that reforming zeal.

Oddly, what I've found is that I now write free of the need to teach, but that my work is still influenced by my beliefs and concerns. However, this now forms themes rather than being the meat of the pieces. So, I'll write a story ostensibly concerning the relationship between two potential lovers but the perceptive reader will recognise the strand of gender inequality lurking under the surface. Or I'll write a futuristic piece apparently about the erotic adventures of a couple of 'eternals' but the reader who sees beneath the surface will detect the thread of debate on the poverty of relationships based entirely on the joys of sex and the danger inherent in allowing technology to develop unchecked by common sense. But the stories will be damn good reads without authorial intrusion. (Those who've read Breaking Faith and The Methuselah Strain may see parallels here).

There's some suggestion that our challenges as writers may be based in our challenges as human beings and I wonder how true that might be.

I left school early in life, due to a combination of external events over which I had little control (see my previous post on Motivating the Writer if you want more detail.) But I'd been brought up as a confirmed Christian and, following a crush I developed on the local curate, as a young man, I'd decided on the Church of England priesthood as my future role in life. Events soon knocked that out of me, however; events and a growing sense of the hypocrisy rampant in organised religion. But my need to 'preach', to 'evangelise' was clearly already deep-rooted even then. Later, when I re-examined my options and looked back at my life and varied career, it became clear that I might, as I'd often been told, have made a good teacher. It's clear that these aspects of my personality have come to the fore in my writing. So we can see where personal challenges become parallels of writing challenges.

As for injustice and my other long-held passions, I think they've developed alongside my self-taught awareness of the wider world. I've quite deliberately exposed myself to those issues that seem important, rather than dive under the covers of simple entertainment or drown myself in the froth and inconsequence of the celebrity culture that now engulfs so many adults.

I've always had what many have described as an unhealthy concern for truth and honesty, perhaps inherited from my extraordinary mother, who was a well-loved local confidante of more people than I realised at the time.

As for my interest in other subjects, my step-father was fascinated by butterflies and moths, by the night sky, by the tales of Ryder Haggard and the poetry of Omar Khayyam, whose work he could quote at length. So, I suppose I developed similar interests more or less inevitably. Though my own interests in science, natural history and fiction are far wider than those I was initially introduced to. But my step-father's passion did spill over and infect me.

So, it would seem there's some evidence to support the view that our personal challenges can become our writing challenges.

I've exposed mine here for you in the hope that such confession might be helpful for my readers and visitors. The refusal to accept or face those challenges that get in the way of good writing are often the cause of blocking of the creative channels. They must be faced and acknowledged before they can be defeated or at least diverted. If you want to write well, you need to discover what your personal challenges are before you can do anything to reduce their influence on your writing. So, whether you're afflicted with something as basic as a lack of grammatical discipline and knowledge or something in the way of a more complex psychological problem, the first step seems to be acknowledgement of the possibility. Once you reach recognition, acceptance is not far behind and it is then that strategies can be put in place to reduce the influence of these challenges on your output.

Up to you. You can either share your own challenges here or keep them private. Either way, a bit of work on them may well result in a more rounded and deeper development as you as a writer. I hope so, anyway. 

Silly and irrelevant question, just for the smile: Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but duck if you throw a revolver at him?

The Dangers of Distraction.

Image via Wikipedia

Do you do it? You know what I mean; participate in social networking. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon and Google+are all sites where you'll find me commenting, posting, bringing items of interest to other people. Then there are the peer review sites; those places where you post a piece of writing and hope for some reviews, but in exchange you have to post reviews of the work of others, which, of course, means reading them. There are even altruistic sites, like Critters, where the emphasis is on the support and nurturing of young talent for no reward other than that of helping out.

All these activities detract from your writing by involving the use of your time. There's so much advice out there on how best to learn to write and how to learn to write well. But one piece of advice stands out from the rest, in my mind at any rate: if you want to write, and write well, ignore everything else, and write. That, of course, is a little sparse and not as comprehensive as it ought to be. If you write without reading, for example, you're doomed to repeat the mistakes of others, doomed to repeat what has already been written, doomed to remain enclosed in your world of delusion where you're a brilliant, if untried and unpublished, writer.

So, to that injunction to write, I must add; read. Read often, read well-written work only, which doesn't necessarily mean best-sellers. I mean, Jeffrey Archer's novels are sometimes described as 'best-sellers', but would you call it good writing? I've read a few of the authors who sell lots of books and discovered that they often write in clichés, clichés of both phrase and idea. Formulaic, superficial writing seems to sell well for reasons I don't understand. But if you're more interested in dollars and pounds than the quality of the work you produce, you know where to find your role models. But be prepared to be forgotten as soon as your book is read. Prepare to be lost to history and the future. It's rare indeed for a best-seller to outlive the era in which the work was published. Oh, there are exceptions; there are always exceptions. They prove the rule, after all.

So, to improve your writing, read extensively from the best you can find. And then, write. Write something new every day, as a priority. Even if you can manage only a few words, even if it's no more than a diary entry, write something, something new, every day. Make it the best you can if it's only a few words. If, on the other hand, you're engaged in the construction of a more beefy piece, a short story, essay, novel or non-fiction tome, then I'd advise you to get the words down first. I know some people are, or feel they are, incapable of moving on until what they've written is the very best they can make it. For most would-be writers that way leads to an eternity of unfinished work. If you get the words down first, you can then revisit and use the editing process to refine and improve.

To return to the beginning: social networking and the like. If you must network, connect, interact - and which of us doesn't do this?- I'd suggest you do it only after you've done your day's writing. If you treat your writing as a profession, treat it as work, you'll be far more able to set and keep to your real priorities. The job of a writer is to write. That's the first priority. Everything else is secondary and should be treated as such.

I speak from experience here.

I've spent most of the past few months engaged in social networking; building that essential writer's platform beloved of agents and publishers. So, I've Tweeted, posted stuff to Facebook, engaged in discussions on LinkedIn, joined groups on Goodreads. It's been productive in terms of contacts and connections. And I've had a great deal of fun in the process; made a great many new friends at various levels of the writing craft from real beginner to accomplished author and every stage between. Met and connected with readers of all sorts. I wouldn't have missed the experience for the world. But, in that time, I've written and submitted too few stories, put down too few words (apart from November last year, when I participated in NaNoWriMo as a way to drive myself back into actually writing, and produced the first draft of a comedy thriller, writing 112,242 words before the time was up). But I have, sitting on my computer, two volumes of an epic fantasy trilogy, and I should have written volume three by now, should have had the books out there in the market place for readers. But no; the networking has taken precedence. So, I know what I'm talking about here.

So, following my own advice, I'm now aiming to produce at least one new story each week, complete the editing and route to publication for my NaNoWriMo novel titled An Avenger Unseen, and begin work on volume three of the epic fantasy. All social networking will take a back seat and be done only when I've completed my writing for that day.

If you want to write, I urge you to write. Leave the distractions, digressions, procrastination for others and you might find there are people out there actually reading the words you've put down. Isn't that something worth aiming for?

A silly question to ponder: If corn oil comes from corn, olive oil from olives, and vegetable oil from vegetables, where does baby oil come from?

The Week and What I've Done With It

So, the end of another week. As usual, nothing like as much done as I'd hoped at the beginning. But, I've completed the first reading and marking up of the NaNoWriMo novel and begun the second phase, reaching chapter 3 and reducing the word count, so far, to 112,043. Along the way, I did a quick check for overused words, using Wordle.com and started to use this to reduce the repetitions in that chapter (the illustration shows the Wordle graphic after the changes). It then seemed to make sense to extend the search for those words to the whole MS. I have the file on the PC as a single file, since that way it's easier to make alterations that are global. Once I'd done about 4 of the repeated words, I suddenly realised this was a waste of time at this stage. I might as well wait to employ this exercise once I've made the other changes, as I'm otherwise replacing words that I might later completely remove.
I've also done a small update to the Writing Contest page - see the tab above. This is quite time consuming, but it keeps my own table up to date and hopefully allows my readers the opportunity to dip into those contests that might interest them.
I've been busy with the social networks, making changes and posts to Facebook, Goodreads, LinkedIn, Digg and tweeting on Twitter.
I'm currently reading a thriller and I've ploughed through a good number of its short chapters whilst Valerie has been watching the sport on TV.
Had a short spell organising a replacement windscreen for the car on Saturday. What's that to do with writing? Well, the chip that caused the old screen to crack happened as I was on my way to my writing group, so a tenuous link, I think.
So, still no contests entered and no short stories sent to magazines. But the coming week....