What makes you a professional writer? There are many possible answers. Among them are:
- A publisher has paid you to write words
- You have committed yourself to daily writing with the intent to publish
- You love writing.
It doesn’t really matter what your definition is. The professional writer writes to be paid to write. Could be ten years before you get paid for what you wrote yesterday. When it sells, you were retroactively a professional writer when you wrote it. Believe that you will eventually be paid, and you instantly become a professional writer.
What I want to tackle in this post is what a professional writer does. This is about the time management of all the things a writer needs to do. The best increment of time for work management is the week. This gives you flexibility to adjust your schedule day to day, without allowing you to push things off until the end of the month. A ‘work week’is therefore seven days. In that work week you allocate a certain number of hours to ‘writing’. A full-time writer should put in at least forty hours, a new writer may dedicate only four. How do we spend that time?
First and foremost, we write. Obviously. How much? When? Where? My rule of thumb is that at least 25% of our work week is adding words to a story. This means two hours a day for a full time writer. Seems easy. You had no problem sitting in a cubicle for eight hours, two hours is a piece of cake. It is not. Two hours of creativity is extremely difficult, especially if you have doubts. Start at ten minutes a day and work up to two hours over a decade or two.
Second is reflection. Thinking about what you wrote, what you are going to write, what you want to change, what you are doing with your life. This is the non-creative part of writing. It is accounting. Log your time. Summarize what you did. Make a note of what worked, what didn’t, what you want to try. Sitting in Starbucks was too distracting. Sitting on the couch wasn’t stimulating. Find your most productive you and cater to it. This is five to fifteen minutes per day. Do it at the end of the day, or throughout the day. Don’t do it the day after. Don’t spend hours doing it. Absolutely do not confuse this with editing what you wrote.
Third is business. Correspondence. Fifteen minutes is usually more than enough time. If you are spending more than that, analyze the content of the correspondence and justify it. Marketing. Spend five minutes per day selling the story. Pitch it to the wall. By the time the story is ready, your pitch will be too. Calendar. You have things to do outside of writing. Make sure those things are scheduled in a way that do not passively hurt your writing.
Fourth is joyfinding. If you cannot find any joy in the life you are living, it is time to change that. If you don’t find joy in writing, it is time to change that. Read your story as if your favorite author wrote it. What would you do differently? What would make the characters more interesting? If no one was ever going to read your words, what would you write? Eventually you will become your favorite author. Eventually you will find joy in most of what you do, because you have begun the process of self-authoring. This is not a percentage of your work week. This is to be done in every waking minute of your life.
Finally, there is editing. Self-editing is what kills most creativity. You go back and read the sentence you just wrote. You begin second guessing every word, character motivation, punctuation mark. This should not be part of your work week. You need to sub-contract this job to someone you trust. Someone who wants you to succeed more than you do. More on this in a future post.
So in summary, define your work week, break it down into tasks, and then document what you actually do.
On day seven, take a break, enjoy your life, and compare what you planned to do with what you actually did. This is the act of the reflective practitioner. Don’t limit this practice just to your writing.