Intro:
Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love.
Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page.
This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state.
Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.
Rhonda:
Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. So today it's just me and you. I wanted to take some time to do a few episodes that kind of cover things that have been on my mind recently and just chat about them with you. So I'm so glad you're here today.
One of my first book finished programme is this idea that I am slow. The book is slow. This is happening too slowly, this is taking too long. And then a lot of writers also tell me that it's hard to find time to write. I think this is really worth talking about, especially now because one of the things that's making it hard to find the time to write is a sense of overwhelm and almost paralysis that has to do with what's going on in the world, whether you're in the United States and all of the things that are happening coming out of the White House there or other countries, that there's no country without issues. It's not a thing.
I'm personally finding it really hard to watch what's happening in Palestine at the moment. And as I see the images coming out of Palestine, wow, with starving human beings, I am just kind of shocked and sent into paralysis as my mind tries to understand why the heck the world is letting this happen. But we will all have things that throw us off our writing rhythm, off our writing game and make it hard to feel like it's possible to find the time and the focus to do the work that we want to do.
And in my case, I'm, as you know, completely obsessed with women and non-binary writers, finishing books and getting them out into the world and finishing a book is a long project. I know there's a lot of BS on the internet about write a book in 30 days, outline your book in a weekend, LA la, and it is mostly bs.
And so it's a long project finishing a book, and we need to stay focused and committed over a long period of time, sometimes months, sometimes a year in order to write the draft, revise the draft, get feedback, integrate that feedback, edit the book, and prepare it for publishing, right? It takes time. And so how do we find the time and how do we find the focus?
So I want to say a couple of things about this, and I'm going to put in the show notes a link to a tool I call the Writer's Weekly Planner, which is a free resource I offer that helps you think about your week as a writer, because I think most of the time when we think about our week, we think about all the other roles that we play in life.
We think about what do I have to do as someone who works for a living? What do I have to do as an employee? What do I have to do as a mother? What do I have to do as a parent? What do I have to do as someone who has caretaking responsibilities for my parents? What do I have to do as someone who just has to get some groceries in the darn fridge and make sure there's toilet paper in the bathroom? What are all the things I have to do to maintain my health to get to the dentist every now and again? Right? All of these things that are required of us, we tend to look at our weak from those perspectives, and I want to encourage you to look at your weak from the perspective that you are a writer first, right?
So we look at our week. I do this every Sunday because I like the spaciousness of how Sunday feels to me, and I'm looking at the week ahead, and I do it every week because every week is different. I might have a dental appointment this week, but then nothing on next week. I might have a really busy period at work this week, but then it eases off. I might have in-laws visiting this week, but then no visitors the next week. So every week is different. And so on Sunday, I open up my planner and I look at my week, and I like to think of my writing time in two ways.
I'm looking for when I look at my schedule, I'm looking for spaces where I can schedule what I call long writing sessions. Now, this is not the kind of writing session that I used to do in my early twenties. When I was younger I really thought that the only way you could get any writing done was if you had hours and hours and hours of time available to you so that you could just sink in and spend four hours on a Saturday or the whole weekend writing. And this turned me into a binge writer and made it really hard to finish anything sooner rather than later, because I would write on one weekend, and then it might be three months before I felt I could get another weekend that felt spacious enough to me. I'm using spacious in air quotes. I know you can't see that, but I am.
And so it turned me into someone who was finishing books in a really slow way because, and this happens all the time for me. Writers will say, oh, I've been working on this book for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. No, you haven't. You have had periods of working on the book and then you have become afraid for some reason, afraid you didn't have the skills, afraid the book wasn't going to turn out the way you wanted it to, afraid you weren't the writer that could tackle this book. And then you abandoned the book for stretches and stretches of time. So if you add it up all the time, you spent over 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. It might be six months of work, but it's taken 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years to finish. And I totally understand this dynamic that we get into, and I did it for a very long time myself.
So what I do now is on Sunday, I sit down and I look at the week ahead, and I'm looking for spaces where I can schedule what I think of as a long time. And for me, that is a space in my schedule where I can spend 30 to 45 minutes writing 30 to 45 minutes, not two hours, not four hours, a half hour to 45 minutes.
When we do community writing sessions in First Book Finish, those sessions are 45 minutes. And that's because there's some really interesting research about sort of energy patterns. And so I like 45 minutes and then a break. And if I'm doing a longer session, say on a weekend, I'll do 45 minutes, take a 15 minute break, come back for another 45 minutes because our brain needs rest in order to do the kind of deep work that writing involves.
So when I sit down on Sunday and I look at my schedule, I'm looking for those 30 to 45 minute blocks where I can sit down and really sink into my writing. Now, I write with the community at First Book Finish quite often, so I'll join a community writing session there, but you can schedule them whenever works for you really whenever you can find 30 to 45 minutes to sit down and focus on your writing.
But I'm also looking for spaces of time that I think of as short time writing sessions. And these are those spaces of time that naturally occur in everyone's schedule. It's where you're in the dentist's office and they're running behind, and you have 15 minutes is where a meeting ended earlier than you thought it was going to end. And so now you've got 20 minutes, right? It's waiting in the doctor's office. It's a few minutes before you start kicking dinner or start doing the laundry. It's the 20 minutes while the laundry's in the washer and the 60 minutes while the laundry's in the dryer. It's those small spaces.
And so I look for those and then I prepare for those. So if I know I'm going to have them, I have to be ready. This is why I have something I call a mobile writing kit that's basically a book themed tote bag. Mine is currently Pride and Prejudice, but you do you. And in that tote bag, I have a set of writing prompts. I have a journal, I have an outline of my novel. I have notes on the scenes. I want to write in my novel and I have pens and so on so that I can be in the dentist's office, in the doctor's office, in a coffee shop, and grabbing 20 minutes.
Now in 20 minutes, sometimes our brain resists. We're like, come on, Rhonda, 10, 15, 20 minutes, how can I possibly get anything done? But you will be surprised. You really will be surprised. In 20 minutes, I could sketch out some backstory for my antagonist. I could elaborate something about my setting. I could figure out what the next two scenes are that I need to incorporate into Act two. There's always something you can do in 15 to 20 minutes.
And what we don't realise because of the way our culture thinks about books, right? Think of all the movies you've seen where someone's typing, typing, typing, the pages pile up, and then the book is published, and then they go on a tour as a bestselling author and buy a castle in Scotland. What? That is not a thing that happens in real life. And so our culture has this idea that books are developed quickly, but actually books are developed 20 minutes at a time, 30 minutes at a time. Over time. That's how books are finished.
And so it's about committing for the long haul, but it's about taking advantage of every moment you can. And that's why short time works so well, because we all have these little bursts of time because the truth about time and your writing life, especially for those of us working on first books, second books, and not working full time as a writer with other things in our lives we have to accomplish and do, we are fitting, we have to fit the writing in and among everything else in our lives.
And so that can be very challenging. It's why these little 15, 20 minute sessions work so well.
So I'm looking every week, I'm looking for long time, 30 to 45 minutes, and sometimes I'll stack those right? 45 minutes a break, 45 minutes if I have the extra time, which I often do on a weekend. And then I'm also looking for the short time and I'm prepared for that with my mobile writing kit.
So grab the resource, the Writer's Weekly Planner. If you don't already have it, it's in the show notes and see how you can shift how you think about your writing week, looking at your week as though you are a first before you figure out all the rest of the things. I guarantee you that you have the time to finish a book.
And if you don't believe me, look at the amount of time you've spent on Netflix or Hulu or HBO in the past week. Look at the notifications your phone is sending you every week saying your screen time was up by 15% last week, right? Let's just be real. We do have some time. We're just not structuring our time in a way that helps us finish the book.
So looking at your week from the perspective that you are a writer first changes that, it changes it, I promise you. So once you find the time, then it's about finding the focus. And I talk to folks in my First Book Finish programme. We talk all the time about setting up a writing ritual that you love. I'll put a link to my The Focused Writer Workshop here as well, because it's a workshop that takes you through understanding how focus works, how focus is a necessary precondition to get into that state of creative flow and walks you through how to set up a writing ritual for yourself that takes advantage of your brain and how your brain works in order to do that.
But the fundamental thing is that you have to be fierce about protecting your own focus and protecting your time. No one's going to show up and say, Hey, Rhonda, I just want to gift you hours and hours of free time for you to finish your book. It's not going to happen. If I want to finish my book, I have to be fierce about it. I have to decide that my dream, my creative dream, and who I become in the process of finishing this book is important to me.
And so I have to make the time. There's no such thing in life as leftover time. I have to look at my schedule and say that time before I go to work or stealing away from the office during that lunch hour to go to a cafe and write, that is important to me, and I'm going to do it. It's important to me. It's important to me to finish the book and to become the writer that I want to be.
One of the things that writing consistently gives you, and by consistently, I don't mean writing every day. I'm not a fan of the real writers write everyday mantra because I think that when you have other things going on in your life that can be challenging, but pretty much everyone can write consistently by which I mean two to three times a week. And you could finish a book in two to three writing sessions a week, I promise you can. I literally have stacks of books behind me from finishers who have done that 2, 3, 4 sessions a week in the occasional little boost on a weekend. It's possible.
But the first step is in looking at your week and the time that's available to you as though you are a writer first. And some of us find that challenging because we think, oh, I should be a mother first. I should be a wife first. I should be an employee first. But what I have found is that I'm not as good a mother, a partner, an employee, unless I feed my creative soul first. If I get up and write at 7:00 AM I'm a naturally a morning writer. It's when my circadian rhythm is kind of at its most creatively energetic, if you like.
And so I love to write in the morning. And on those days when I get up and I write in the morning, and then I go through the rest of my day, oh, I am a happy human being and I'm easier to deal with. And I don't have that sense of feeling resentful that the world has taken time from me, that I'm meant to spend. I'm meant to spend finishing my book, that I'm meant to spend achieving my creative dreams that I meant to spend in my identity as a writer. And so I'm not resentful about my work. I'm not resentful about all the demands that are placed on me. And we all have those, don't we? Right? We all have things we have to accomplish and achieve.
And so thinking about myself as a writer first helps me look at the week and find the time that I need to find in order to be able to finish the work that I need to finish. So I hope this helps you. This week, I'll put the link to the Writer's Weekly Planner, it's a free resource. The Focused Writer Workshop is not free. There's a small charge for that, and it literally walks you through exactly what you need to do to get yourself into a state of focus, which is the necessary precondition to being in a state of creative flow.
So I'll put both of those there for you in case that's helpful. And I am going to do a few more of these episodes where it's just you and I chatting, and I hope they're helpful. You can always let me know. I'm on Instagram at Resilient Writers, so send me a DM and I'd love to hear from you. Okay? Take care, and we'll talk soon.
Outro:
Thanks so much for hanging out with me today and for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. While you're here, I would really appreciate it if you'd consider leaving a rating and review of the show. You can do that in whatever app you're using to listen to the show right now, and it just takes a few minutes.
Your ratings and reviews tell the podcast algorithm gods that yes, this is a great show, definitely recommend it to other writers. And that will help us reach new listeners who might need a boost in their writing lives today as well. So please take a moment and leave a review. I'd really appreciate it. And I promise to read every single one. Thank you so much.
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Grab the Planner and a cup of coffee or tea. Give it a quick read and learn how to think about and plan your week like a productive writer. (Yep, this resource is totally FREE!)
