Switching Things Up When Life Changes

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the writing life over the years, is that I have my best results in terms of productivity if I can be flexible.

Flexibility with when and where I write makes a tremendous difference.  And it’s been something I had to accept right off the bat because I was writing with a toddler in the house circa 2003.

The funny thing is that I’m ordinarily one of the least-flexible people I know.  When plans change in the morning, I’m flustered. I have to carefully think through all the ways that the change of plans impacts all the other moving parts of that particular day.  Frequently, it’s like a domino effect.

But with writing, I’ve come to accept that change happens. It happened when my younger child went off to elementary school.  It happened when my two children (very quickly) weren’t in the same school anymore and I was driving two carpools. It happened when they started to drive themselves. And lately, it happened with an empty nest, child-wise…and a fuller nest now that my husband has a new job where he’s based from home, too.

Here are my tips for trying to work through changes in a household experiencing a lot of transitions:

Assess what still works. 

This is whatever still works from your old routine…and what works 90% of the time.   Since this is the framework of your writing day from the past, some of it will still work and some of it won’t (I clearly can’t sneak in carpool line writing anymore since there are no more carpools with the kids gone).

Another thing that still works well for me is to push through the first draft without stopping for edits or even for chapter breaks.   For you, it’s anything that’s been successful for you in the past that can help keep you on track.

Assess what works sometimes.

Writing in another location can work for me sometimes, especially if I don’t seem to be making much progress at home.  But frequently, I can get just as much done at home without the driving aggravation.  I just have to figure out what works best for what day.

Assess where you are in the middle of the day.

When I don’t do this, I can occasionally find that the entire day has gone by in a flash of errands, phone calls, etc. and that I haven’t come close to accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish.

If I take a look at lunchtime to see how I’m doing and to plan the rest of the day, I usually can manage to fit in more writing, social media, and whatever household-related stuff has come up.

Remember your old standbys for success.

Is there anything you’ve used in the past to meet your goals and then discarded?  I always swore by my mini-outlines at the end of each writing session.  Those brief outlines were just a couple of sentences explaining what I hoped to cover the next day.  Then, suddenly, I didn’t need them as much.  But now, in the middle of a lot of changes and transitions, it’s helped to fall back on them again.

The same goes for slipping in another writing session whenever I have a few minutes. The aforementioned timer can, again, help with focus. Sometimes it’s a good way to get just a few more words for the day.

Ask yourself what may work now. 

Maybe mornings no longer work for you and lunch or evenings are better for you.

Maybe you need to shorten your writing sessions to ten minutes at a time.

Maybe you need to look into some light outlining.

Maybe you need to get up a few minutes earlier or turn in a few minutes later.

Just try to figure out what might work and give it a go.  If it doesn’t help, try something else.

How flexible are you with your writing routine?  Has your routine changed over the years?

Photo credit: Jnzl’s Photos on Visualhunt / CC BY