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What every writer needs

Every writer craves a pub­lish­er, an ed­it­or and most of all, time to write. An ocean full of story ideas, hefty roy­alty cheques and some re­cog­ni­tion doesn’t hurt either.

But you know what writers need most? Downtime. That’s right, big chunks of do noth­ing time when frag­ments of ideas can bounce around the cra­ni­um and pos­sibly morph into some­thing brilliant.

At some point every writer sits in front of their com­puter strain­ing for the right word, phrase or sen­tence. But let’s say they for­get all that and take a hike with the dog or stand in the shower for a long time let­ting hot wa­ter sluice over their limbs. That’s of­ten when an “aha!” mo­ment and the an­swer to the prob­lem appears.

But how of­ten do any of us give ourselves any real down­time? There’s al­ways an email to an­swer, an er­rand to run or a dead­line to meet. And in today’s high tech world, even a walk in the woods doesn’t guar­an­tee un­in­ter­rup­ted downtime.

Scott Belsky, au­thor of Making Ideas Happen and CEO of Behance, dis­cusses this in “What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space.” According to Belsky, every­one, es­pe­cially cre­at­ive folks, should sched­ule reg­u­lar downtime.

One thing Belsky sug­gests is es­tab­lish­ing a ritu­al for un­plug­ging. Yes, I know it sounds blas­phem­ous but this means mak­ing a point of turn­ing off your com­puter, cell phone, Blackberry and maybe your land­line too.

Downtime on a Sunday af­ter­noon. And, no, I did­n’t chop any wood first.

Sundays are my down­time days. I get up when I want, eat when I want, take a nap if I want, read and putter with no par­tic­u­lar goal in mind. And, even though I don’t com­pletely un­plug, I try not to have the com­puter on for long.

Once a year or so, Rick and I head to Tofino for a totally un­plugged hol­i­day. The beach cab­in we stay at does­n’t have a phone or Internet con­nec­tion and there’s no TV, ra­dio or even a clock.

It’s hard to de­scribe how lib­er­at­ing that is. And the re­lax­a­tion goes way be­yond an ocean view and strolls on the beach. The sense of let­ting go – the re­lief of not hav­ing to check or re­spond to any­thing or any­body — is enormous.

And, what’s really in­ter­est­ing is the cre­at­ive en­ergy I feel after a do noth­ing day or an es­cape to Long Beach. Plot prob­lems seem to dis­solve, a good re­source comes to mind or a pos­sible way to end a chapter presents it­self. Not every time, of course, but enough to know that down­time is an im­port­ant part of be­ing a writer.

Downtime. It’s im­port­ant and I need more of it in my life. So, I’ve just made a big do noth­ing date with my­self for the week­end. Who knows, it might be the best cre­at­ive ses­sion I’ve had in a long time.

 

 

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The writing triangle: three essentials for writers

Sometimes it seems like the stars have to be per­fectly aligned in the heav­ens for any real writ­ing to be done, nev­er mind start­ing and fin­ish­ing a book.

But there are some ele­ments that help. Inspiration is one but it’s un­pre­dict­able at the best of times. It’s far bet­ter to use what I call the the writ­ing triangle.

The tri­angle is com­posed of a place, a time and a plan.

Every writer de­serves – and needs – a place to write. Some folks are happy at the kit­chen table or su­per cre­at­ive at the loc­al cap­puccino bar. Personally, I think to be most ef­fect­ive, a per­son should have a room – no mat­ter how small – that they can call all their own. If need be, it can even be part of a room. What’s im­port­ant is that this be a place where you will not be disturbed.

Once you have a place, you need a time. And that doesn’t mean whenev­er you can make time or the cre­at­ive muse hap­pens to strike. If you are ser­i­ous about writ­ing you will make time to pur­sue your craft on a reg­u­lar basis.

This might be a couple of hours in the morn­ing be­fore you go to work, two hours after the kids go to bed or four hours on Saturdays. The im­port­ant de­tail here is to have a reg­u­lar time and stick to it. Make this your time for writ­ing, wheth­er you feel like it or not. Believe me, if you sit in front of a blank screen long enough, the bore­dom will make you want to write.

And, con­trary to pop­u­lar opin­ion or a strong sense of re­spons­ib­il­ity or guilt, very few things will hap­pen that re­quire your im­me­di­ate at­ten­tion. Years ago when my step-daugh­ter was young, I had my writ­ing desk in a corner of the liv­ing room. After many in­ter­rup­tions I nicely but firmly asked her not to dis­turb me un­less we needed to evac­u­ate the house or someone needed to go to the hos­pit­al. It worked. (But hav­ing a private place makes it easier.)

Now for the plan part. If you want to fin­ish a book and not make it your life work, it’s best to give your­self a dead­line. Let’s say you’re start­ing your pro­ject on January 1 and want to have a com­pleted first draft by Sept. 1. Divide those 35 weeks by the num­ber of chapters  you es­tim­ate your book will have. Now you know how much time you can de­vote to each chapter. For ex­ample 35 weeks di­vided by 16 chapters means you can spend about two weeks writ­ing each chapter.

Don’t be overly op­tim­ist­ic – va­ca­tions and life hap­pen and you want to en­joy them. But you also want to fin­ish your book. And don’t get overly anal about your plan; it is a guideline, not writ­ten in stone.

Every time I be­gin a book I make a plan and ad­just it as ne­ces­sary. That means once a month or so I check my plan to see how I’m do­ing. To date I’ve nev­er fin­ished a draft or book when I ini­tially thought I would, but without a place, time and plan, I know it would have taken me much longer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Campie in Three Easy Parts — guest blog by Barbara Stewart

What it was like:

The card­board box sat on the floor be­side the kit­chen table for four years. I walked around it, passed food over it and oc­ca­sion­ally shoved it around with the Dirt Devil.

Inside the box, the guts and soul of a book: a length of house­hold string; a pack­age of matches; a 2003 Telus cal­en­dar; a BC Interior road map; the Fall 2002 is­sue of GUSHER; hand­writ­ten pages torn from a Mead note­book; the first typed chapter of Campie. I’d star­ted writ­ing with­in days of leav­ing the oil­rig camp in January 2003, open­ing with the de­clar­at­ive: “The job star­ted with a fraud and ended with a lie.” (I loved that sentence.)

Oh, and one more thing was in the box: from the Saturday Post, April 19, 2003, an es­say by Don Gillmore titled, “On Saturday Nights, I Dreamt of Saturday Nights.” Gillmore had writ­ten about his ex­per­i­ence as a rough­neck on an oil­rig. I tucked it into the box to pun­ish my­self for not fin­ish­ing the book.

What happened:

When I turned 50, I made a de­cision to stop feel­ing bad about my past. This meant re­tir­ing an aging in­ner blues trio called The Ambitions, Hopes and Dreams. “Sorry gals,” I said, “You gotta go. Momma needs a new tune … some­thing like ‘Goodbye Alibi.’”

Six years later, I gradu­ated from the University of Victoria with a BA and a book con­tract with Heritage House Publishers for Campie. The prot­ag­on­ist had be­come a Barbara per­sona dis­tanced by a nar­rat­ive arc in chapters.

I wasn’t me. Campie didn’t be­come a real book and my private story wasn’t pub­lic un­til I pressed SEND to the pub­lish­er. Not many nights later, I woke up in a sweat to a comeback chor­al per­form­ance of that sen­ti­ment­al oldie “Who’s Sorry Now?”

What it’s like now: 

I came to real­ize that it wasn’t pub­lic ex­pos­ure I feared at all. My motive for writ­ing Campie was to tell a story about fail­ure and hope. The un­der­belly served a pur­pose. Although it took a few deep breaths to own the in­tro­duc­tion, “a sober cel­ib­ate bank­rupt ve­get­ari­an …”

No, it was the re­ac­tion of fam­ily and friends — those per­son­ally im­pacted by what I had written­ — whose love mattered the most. Unconditional ac­cept­ance by and for strangers was an easy grace.

When my sis­ter said the book was so won­der­ful she couldn’t put it down, when my moth­er said she loved it and we talked about where it made her cry, when my daugh­ter or­gan­ized my first read­ing and in­vited her closest friends, when my son sup­por­ted me for three months while I wrote and thanked me for all that I’d gone through, that’s when I knew I had pro­jec­ted judg­ments only with­in myself.

These Bessie Smith lyr­ics said it so well:

“Now all the crazy things I had to try, Well I tried them all and then some, But if you’re lucky one day you find out, Where it is you’re really com­ing from.”

Campie gave that luck to me.

Paula’s note: Barbara Stewart’s Campie, a new re­lease by Heritage House Publishing, is the best book I’ve read in a long time. It’s funny, scary and brave. The writ­ing is fresh and ori­gin­al; there’s no ar­ti­fice or fancy man­euv­er­ing, just a great story told straight from the heart.

 

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Grants for writers

Most au­thors make a liv­ing through mul­tiple in­come streams. These in­clude book ad­vances, roy­al­ties and spin off arti­cles, as well as fees for for­eign dis­tri­bu­tion, movie rights, etc. Authors in Canada may also re­ceive an­nu­al pay­ments from the Public Lending Right Program and Access Copyright. Many coun­tries have sim­il­ar programs.

And then there are grants. These usu­ally in­volve a cash pay­ment of $500 to $20,000 and can buy a writer time for re­search and writ­ing or cov­er travel ex­penses re­lated to their pro­ject. Different coun­tries, states and provinces and some mu­ni­cip­al­it­ies of­fer grants to writers.

Some grants avail­able to writers in British Columbia, Canada, where I live include:

BC Arts Council

The Canada Council for the Arts

Access Copyright Foundation 

You can check out the links page at The Writers’ Union of Canada to find more Canadian arts or­gan­iz­a­tions that provide grants to writers.

Applying for a grant is tempt­ing and some writers make a good por­tion of their in­come this way. Obtaining fund­ing can mean the dif­fer­ence between fin­ish­ing a book in a timely man­ner or hav­ing to space the pro­ject out over time due to tak­ing on oth­er short term writ­ing gigs to pay the bills.

But grants are a lot of work. Most re­quire a de­tailed out­line of your pro­ject, a budget, a re­sume, a list of pub­lic­a­tion cred­its, let­ters of ref­er­ence and writ­ing samples. I re­cently ap­plied for an Access Copyright Foundation Research grant for the book I’m writ­ing about cougars.

I’ve writ­ten – and re­ceived – grants in the past so sat down to de­term­ine how much time this ap­plic­a­tion would take. I es­tim­ated two long, full days at the most. At the end of five days I staggered out of my of­fice clutch­ing a 28-page document.

Do I think the time spent was worth it? If I get the grant, the an­swer will be a re­sound­ing “Yes!” But even if I don’t re­ceive any money, it was still a worth­while endeavor.

Why? Because it forced me to cre­ate a de­tailed plan for an im­port­ant as­pect of my re­search. I now know who I want to con­tact and what I want to ask them. I also have a pro­jec­ted timeline of how long the re­search will take. (I don’t know if that last bit should make me happy or want to cry — if my es­tim­ate of the grant ap­plic­a­tion pro­cess is any­thing to go by, the re­search will take at least twice as long as I ex­pect it to!)

So, if you’re think­ing of ap­ply­ing for a grant, be sure to weigh the time com­mit­ment against the be­ne­fits. That said, an im­port­ant thing to re­mem­ber: If you nev­er ap­ply for a grant, you’ll nev­er get one.