Term time has started, so that means as of last week, I’ve been back into the full swing of work in secondary education. When I was catching up with a teaching colleague who I hadn’t talked to for a while, she asked me how I manage to get any writing time alongside full-time work and family life. My honest answer to this was, I don’t know.
I suppose, now that I’ve had time to think about it, fitting in writing time (along with time reading submissions for Bindweed Anthologies) is a juggling act. It’s important to me, however, so I make time for it. Even if I only write a few sentences a day, I consider that time well spent. The longer I’m away from writing anything new in a work-in-progress, the harder I find it to get back into the swing of things. Often, I’ll end up spending more time reading back through what I had already written than drafting anything new, if I leave it too long, so it’s easier to keep chipping away, little and often.
Carrying a laptop/other writing device helps
Snatching a few sentences, or a paragraph here and there on my lunch break is only manageable if I always have a device to write on. Lately I have moved away from writing in notebooks, as it’s too time consuming for my current lifestyle needs to have to type up work later – I find that carrying a memory stick around is handier as I can then use any computer that I have access to at work to squeeze in some writing time. A memory stick is my fallback option though; I tend to never be without my laptop these days.
Keeping my WIP active in my mind throughout the day
When I’m daydreaming, which for me is most of my day, I tend to turn my thoughts to my writing. In the preceding paragraph, I mentioned that I don’t tend to write my current WIPs in a notebook these days – but that doesn’t mean I don’t carry a writing notebook for story ideas, chapter planning and writing research. This helps me to keep the flow of my work later, no matter what the draft may be.
Learning how to multitask, particularly remaining sociable while writing
During the course of 18 years of balancing writing alongside day work, I have developed the necessary skills that allow me to talk to colleagues without breaking the flow of my writing. That’s not to say I don’t lose the thread; it’s just that I’m now able to get back into writing quite promptly after a distraction, compared with a decade ago when I could only write while in complete isolation. My recent skills have been honed by having a young child at home asking me questions every few minutes while I’m typing away at a novel draft. Being a literary mama means being able to switch my focus and concentration (and let’s face it, energy) between tasks quite quickly. Writer parents out there, are you with me?
Leilanie Stewart 