I’ve strapped myself into the pilot’s seat, and I’m flying the plane of the novel right to its destination.
You’d be surprised how you don’t have creative energy after working all day and then writing most of the night, to come up with something all meta and insightful to say about the life of a writer.
Or maybe you wouldn’t.
Day job writer (me) usually can manage to write about two hours at night before that’s it, and she feels like her brain is full of virgin polyester (why yes, I *do* know quilters!).
Is the difference between a freelance and a day job writer that you have more of those two hour increments during the day, and you can get in, say, three writing sessions? Or do we work about the same speed?
And if a tree falls in the forest, and a publicist isn’t around to report on it, does it really make a sound?
Those of you who write for more than two hours at a time, tell me, how did you build up those big writer muscles?
Inchoate and incoherent,
Catherine
Honestly? As a freelancer, I scrape MINUTES to write around the freelancing deadlines, and when I’m not focused on the work deadlines I’m scrambling to catch up on mundane things like laundry. (Admittedly, I have a mitigating factor in that I’m a work-at-home mom with a nearly-two-year-old who’s currently in the “let’s see how many ways I can destroy myself and the house” phase.)
I sometimes schedule writing days where I run away to a coffee shop (you hush, Scalzi!) just to get a couple of hours to focus without distraction on writing. Once I get going on those, I can keep going for three or four hours.
My hope is that as my son gets into preschool, I’ll be able to craft more of a schedule, with writing in the evenings and work during the days (or vice versa). When my daughter went to preschool, it was like my writing world opened up again (she’s now in elementary school), so I’m trying to be patient. And scrape as many writing minutes as I can.
I don’t know how they could do it. When my day job was (or these days “is”) more focused on designing things I’d come home and feel like a burned out lightbulb (there’s a phrase going the way of “dialing a phone”). I maybe could squeeze out a hundred words of uninspiring prose, but it felt like yelling into a vacuum chamber. It’s one of the reasons I took the former day job (although the newer one, same company, isn’t all that demanding of the design sense) because while I worked in the same field, it wasn’t a “design position” (sort of the paper-hat job of the creative world). Fortunately for me it also paid more that the other “design” jobs I was being offered (and see available on Monster these days).
While a non-computer programmer may find this perplexing, I use the same creative energy for writing computer code as I do for working on a novel. Unless I have a lull in one of the other, I always feel stretched thin.
An editor was feeling me out for pro-blogging job once, and I had to turn him down. It would have been a great career builder, but I never would have been able to keep up the amount of output he desired and stay productive in my day job.