Resources and Tips
Balancing Paid and Personal Creative Writing
AWP 2012, Chicago

Priorities and Life Goals
Defining Balance
Tech Resources
Business Principles Applied to Creative Writing
Working from Home
Voice & Style
Writing Spaces
Time & Task Management
Writing Is in Your Head

Priorities and Life Goals

Entrepreneurs and executives know that you won’t get far in business without establishing goals and establishing priorities. A writer is an entrepreneur, and the same techniques that work for starting and running a successful business will make you a successful creative writer. Start thinking of your personal writing as a career and stop treating it as a hobby — and letting others do the same.

There are many online tools and books on this topic, from What Color Is Your Parachute to the excellent resources at Mind Tools.

You don’t have to map out your life. Just identify which three big-picture things are most important to you personally. Your career? Your family? Friends? Writing? Volunteer work? Earning a certain amount of money? Becoming well-known? Traveling the world? A cause you’re passionate about?

Pick the top three to five, put them in order. Easy way to do this is to imagine you had six  months to live. What would you give up, and what would you spend more time on?

The Life Career Rainbow might help.
Some tips on personal goal setting.
Remember to keep goals SMART — it works for business, and it will work for your writing.

Defining Balance

We tend to think of balance as the scales of Justice, as if there were only one perfect point for everyone and it requires equal weight on two items. But balance is highly subjective; yours is different from mine, and there aren’t only two roles competing for your time. How much time and mental energy you choose to give each role, and when you give it, are up to you.

The Wheel of Life is my favorite visual tool. Instructions and the worksheet can be downloaded as PDFs, or check the free online version.

Part of balance is knowing where you are now. Take stock of how your spend your time today.

First, focus on physical time — where you spend your minutes each day. You can reconstruct your prior week or track the next week; either works. I tend to underestimate time, so I find tracking a few days helpful.

Break your time spent into buckets: Work, commuting, family, friends, personal chores, family chores, exercise, reading, writing, sleeping, and the big time-suck, television.

Figure out when you can schedule writing. Boot things that aren’t on your priorities list, like that weekly poker game with the neighbors you don’t much like, anyway, or more than one or two television shows.

Pencil in the writing. Schedule it. Protect it.

It’s All In Your Head (Thinking About Writing)

Writing takes place in our minds before the page. We create characters and scenes by thinking.

The more time you spend thinking about your writing, the less time you have to spend thinking about it while doing it in your scheduled time slot.

This is the only freebie you’ll get in life — time you can double up. You can think about your writing while you’re commuting, exercising, or folding laundry.

Bonus: If you use that time for thinking about writing, you won’t use it to fume about your boss’s bad idea or what your mother-in-law said at Christmas. Instant happiness.

Business Principles Applied to Creative Writing

The big three are:

1. Determining your audience and story or message (which can change as needed)
2. Setting milestones
3. Scheduling time for writing and for thinking about writing

You do these things for your work writing now, so it’s just a matter of applying those skills.

Voice & Style Differentiation

The hardest thing for me is to keep my business-writing voice from infecting my personal creative voice, and vice versa. One is short, direct, and simple; the other is complex lyric narrative.

Switch gears each writing session by reading something written in the voice you intend to use. Re-read the piece you just finished, or read an author’s work that is similar to yours or that you aspire to. It primes your brain to think and write the way you want at that moment.

It also helps to always have something to finish or copyedit to start each writing session, so you’re not facing the blank page.

Working from Home, Freelancing

If you freelance, your clients and paid writing can take over your life. Worse, working from home encourages others to view your time as flexible and fungible.

Here’s what works for me:

• Use two separate spaces for professional writing and personal writing
• Negotiate writing time with family and friends
• Set working hours and stick to them — don’t let them bleed into personal time

Clients and friends will respect you more for having boundaries and keeping your word than they will for being always available to them, any hour of any day. I’ve had this proven to me countless times.

Establish working hours and don’t check email outside of them. Let calls go to voicemail if they’re outside of office hours. Only respond to voicemail that will have significant repercussions if you wait until tomorrow (this will be rare, by the way).

Writing Spaces

Writing spaces are personal; what works for me won’t work for everyone. But it’s a rare writer who can spend eight or more hours writing paid business copy and then switch gears to personal creative projects in that same space. Often the layout of the space is arranged specifically for work writing, whether it’s your company’s cubicle or a home office.

There are books telling you how to create a room or niche and put up pictures or items that inspire you. I can’t recommend them because they all use time-consuming techniques and require a budget for redecorating (and a dedicated space).

You don’t need some super-funky writer’s office. You don’t even need a space that you control. You just need to find what works for you, and find more than one of those if possible. My two best writing spaces are a noisy coffee shop that has old wooden theater seats in it — hard and low to the ground — and my garage, on a folding table surrounded by boxes and tools and canned goods. There’s nothing creative about the garage, and the coffee shop isn’t comfortable. But for some reason the chaos in each place lets me focus on the chaos in my head.

And I will not write client work in those places. Ever. It’s easier to leave your job at your job when you’re not bringing it home on your laptop, or when it’s not done at your home. If you work from home, you need a professional office “space” and a writing space, and don’t let the two cross.

Tech Resources

Technology can distract us from writing (YouTube and Facebook, I’m talking to you). It can also help us do more with less effort and inspire creativity.

Writing software is the biggest motivator or annoyance.

Scrivener is by far the best in my opinion (and hundreds of thousands of others’). Try it. It thinks like a writer does, it exports to Word for clients or publishers who require it, and it’s far, far easier to manipulate scenes, chapters, footnotes, endnotes, research, and cut or draft material in a single place.

Things that work for me, in no particular order:

• Voice recording while walking, exercising, or commuting.
• If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, use the free Voice Memos function under Settings. Get a mic you can clip to your collar or use any pair of headphones with integrated mic (iPhone headphones).
• Better quality recording, such as I use for recording interviews, requires a decent mic.
• iPod Classic and older iPod users and anyone wanting better audio quality than the mono Voice Memos have options. The best-rated is the Blue Microphones Mikey, but I use the cheaper Belkin TuneTalk recorder/speaker and mic. It’s great for interviews, but it does offer only an hour and twenty minutes or so of recording time.
• Android users can get TapeMachine, which will record via speaker or Bluetooth headset, and as a bonus also lets you record phone calls (please adhere to all laws before you do this). Tip: Put your phone on Airplane mode before you start recording, or incoming calls will interrupt your recording.
• Transcribe what you record. The best free transcription software I’ve found is F5 Audio Transcription for Mac and Windows. It lets you slow playback to match your typing speed, and every time you pause, it backs up the recording three seconds. When you return a paragraph, it time-stamps your typed text and stores the audio and text file as a single file. You can export the text as RTF or copy and paste into your writing software. I like transcription over voice dictation because I can refine, edit, and rewrite as I type.
• Voice dictation software can turn your audio recording into text automatically, but I’d use the full-blown programs only if you’re trying to eliminate your typing, as it’s expensive and requires a learning curve. But there are free or cheap programs that do a lot. The best I’ve found is Dragon Dictation and now Dragon Express (in beta now and available through Apple’s App Store for only $50 right now). Both require working from your computer, not a phone or iPod.
• One exception is the free app Dragon Dictation for the iPhone or iPod Touch.
• Set up email rules and folders to automatically file the newsletters and updates you subscribe to, so they’re not in your email inbox and you don’t get a notification. Instructions for Gmail, Windows and Apple Mail users here.
• Try a voicemail-to-text or email system, or one that transcribes your voicemails so you can view them as an email. YouMail does a good job, free for text/email notification, and it’s only $5.00 a month for transcription that you can read in email or text. This makes it easy to sift voicemails and respond only to those that must be answered before the next business day.
• No iPhone but wish you had Siri voice assistant? Try the free DragonGo for Android.
• There are dozens of task managers and systems, from big to tiny. A few that get high praise:
  Getting Things Done (GTD) is a system that costs $48/month, or buy the book
  Wunderlist free task manager for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Mac, and Windows
  Awesome Note is the top task manager for iPhone and iPod Touch, but Android users should stick with Wunderlist.

Time & Task Management

Use with caution!

It’s easy to get sucked into one of these systems and become focused on getting more things done in a day rather than getting the right things done. Learn to say no to things that don’t match your personal priorities before building any to-do list.

There are dozens of task managers and systems, from big to tiny. A few that get high praise:
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a system that costs $48/month, or buy the book
Wunderlist free task manager for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Mac, and Windows
Awesome Note is the top task manager for iPhone and iPod Touch, but Android users should stick with Wunderlist.

Have tips and ideas you’d like to share? Send them to me and I’ll post them with credit to you, and a link to your site.