- Resolve to balance work, family, writing, and everything else in your life.
- Understand that you will never be able to balance work, family, writing, and everything else in your life.
- Understand that, from this point forward, in order to be successful in any one area of your life, you will need to neglect one or more other areas of your life. This means that, at all times, you will be either a bad parent, a bad writer, or a bad employee. Get used to being one of these things.
- The trick is to make sure you’re not being all three of these things all at once.
- Example: Re: three, above. My use of “either” is grammatically incorrect. I could go back and correct it. But I’d rather spend the time that would take with my kids.
- Write. Write when you can, as much as you can.
- Throw away your television.
- Writing is like having a baby. If you wait until you can afford to spare the time, you’ll never do it.
- Don’t be pretentious about your writing habits. Don’t tell yourself that you’ll only write on days when you have three uninterrupted hours to devote to the enterprise. Grab any half-hour you can.
- Write between diapers. Write between bottles. Write between the assignments you have to take to keep the job you have to work to give you the time you’ll never have enough of to write the things you want to write.
- Write what you want to write.
- Which is to say: Ignore the market.
- Which is to say: Just because dystopian young adult fiction sells well, if that fiction doesn’t light you up, write whatever does.
- Which is another way of saying: Follow your bliss.
- Spend time with your family.
- Okay, don’t throw away your television. You’ll miss it when the tornado’s on the way. But, at least, like, unsubscribe from premium cable.
And don’t even think about stealing your friend’s HBO Go code. Yes, everyone does it, but that doesn’t mean most TV won’t waste your time.
- Read. This one sounds like a luxury, but if you fail to refill the well of inspiration, how will you be inspired to write words of your own?
- No, seriously, step away from the remote. You’ll never know how much free time you actually have until you give up TV.
- Write every day.
- When you’re neglecting one area of your life too fervently, you may have to give up writing for a day. Take your kids to the park. Take your partner on a date. File those papers you promised your boss you filed last week.
- Play catchup in other life areas in binge sessions, because writing in binge sessions rarely yields great work. A law of diminishing returns kicks in after any four or five straight hours of writing.
- Don’t even. If you’re watching Game of Thrones, you have time to write.
- Read hard. Love hard. Work hard. Write hard. Do this to the best of your ability, and no one can fault you for it.
- Okay, so there are some really good shows on HBO, especially The Wire, but you really, really have to be careful. No TV diet ever hurt anyone, especially an aspiring fiction writer.
- Family trumps all. If, at the end of your life, you’ve written five books, but have a solid life with your partner, that’s preferable to twenty-five books and a parade of ruined lives in your wake. These things aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. Plenty of prolific writers have fine family lives. But, if I had to choose, I know which I’d pick. I’m just saying.
- Okay, Six Feet Under as well, but, seriously, that’s it. And no more than one episode per day.
- Write when you want to write. Write when you don’t want to write. Write when the sun is shining and when it rains. Don’t write when the tornado’s on the way. Take shelter. A good root cellar or bunker is best.
- Better yet, do throw away your television.
- Hug your partner. Give him or her a kiss. Having a supportive partner is your best bet at being a successful writer.
- Results vary. Side effects range from obscurity to the Nobel Prize.
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