Just over a month ago, I started a new part-time job. It’s been a really wonderful experience, but even before I started, I could hear this little voice inside that asked: But what about the writing?
Any newness in my life, any shift in my schedule or additional commitments seems to trigger that fear that there will be less space for the writing.
And the truth is that recently there has been less writing time—and also less energy and focus for my creative projects—than there was before.
Logically I understand this. Even though math has never been my strong suit, I know that more time required for X, Y and Z equals fewer hours when I could (in theory) be writing. I’m also more aware than perhaps I was in the past of the energy that any sort of transition takes, how much time and energy is needed when beginning something new.
But that voice—the part of me that fears I’ll stop writing—isn’t thinking logically. It’s in a fearful, anxious place, and it doesn’t want a rationale, and it definitely doesn’t want to be told that it just needs to be patient.
In the past, I dealt with that fear by committing to more, pushing myself to be more productive during these periods of newness or transition, increasing my word count goals or number of writing sessions per week. When I had less to give, I pushed myself harder on my creative projects as if the hours in the day and my energy levels weren’t limited, as if forcing myself to do too much and exhaust myself to the point of breaking was the only way to prove my devotion to my creative work.
I’d be continually trapped in a scarcity mindset, focusing on the lack, the restriction, the not enoughness. As Jessica Abel discusses in this post, there’s a particular brand of scarcity that many creatives experience:
“it most often includes some level of financial scarcity, and it almost certainly includes time scarcity (juggling our art with day jobs, family, etc.)… But there’s also scarcity of respect or status for our work (coming from others), and scarcity of self-actualization (the need to make the work that we care so much about) when there’s always a lack of time and focus for that work.”
I’m aware of how often in the past I’ve focused on making choices, particularly around employment, that I tell myself are in the best interests of the writing and will create more space eventually without actually coming from a place where I am centring the writing now or in the moment.
Oliver Burkeman talked about this tendency in a recent issue of his newsletter, The Imperfectionist. So many of us wait for a point in the future, when the conditions will be right, to do our most important work or to live in the way we intend; whereas, Burkeman points out that we actually need to do the reverse, “embodying a certain orientation toward life now, first, then doing stuff – rather than doing the stuff in an effort to attain the orientation.”
I’ve had this type of Venn diagram in my mind for the last few weeks. A circle for what I want, another one focused on how I work best, and then another for what is actually possible right now, what I have the actual capacity to do.
It feels like where they intersect in the middle, that’s where the possibility for my creative work right now exists.
For example, I want to continue drafting my novel. I know that I work best when I’m consistently connecting with my creative work, but I also know from experience that drafting is better when I can devote bigger blocks of focused time rather than in short bursts, so what’s possible right now feels like a couple of longer working sessions on the novel each week—and that alongside those I can still connect daily with my creativity through freewriting, or craft or inspiration reading, or writing about my process, or listening to a podcast, or researching, or getting out for a walk and letting myself think about the possibilities for the novel, all of those things that we so often discount as “not writing” but which are just as necessary for my process as my drafting sessions.
If you’re a writer struggling with feeling you don’t have enough time for your creative work (and I don’t know many writers who haven’t experienced this tension at some stage or as an ongoing challenge in their creative process), you might try answering those same questions. What do you want in your creative life right now? How do you work best? What is possible right now?
And then one follow-up question might be around the types of supports you need. What would help you stay accountable to what you’ve decided in possible during this period of your writing life? Would it be helpful to seek out an accountability partner or schedule writing sessions in person or on Zoom with someone else to help you show up on days when it might feel harder to stick with the commitment you’ve set for your writing? Would some type of external deadline—i.e., sharing a draft with your writing group or writing coach—help motivate you, or is it more useful in this period to remove all expectation and pressure and just enjoy the act of slowing down and immersing yourself in the feeling of writing down each individual word?
I hope you find, like me, that focusing on what’s possible right now opens up a space of possibility. Possibility for your creative work, possibility for your process and how you want to create, and also the possibility of doing both things in a sustainable and nourishing way.
