Finding Your Voice

I’ve been lucky to be a freelance writer of nonfiction for many years.  A fantastic tribe of readers — people like you — have supported my efforts by buying my books, attending my talks, sharing your thoughts and otherwise making my work a joy.  Even those of you who send me notes from your prison cells add a little something to my life that just wouldn’t be there if I were still unloading trucks for a living. 

But you will have noticed that I have not been as productive over the past few years as I was the previous ten.  I did make a foray into becoming a literary agent, but mostly that time has been spent on projects that have not come to fruition (yet, anyway).

What projects?  Glad you asked.  I had a dream.  Not the world-peace-and-prosperity dream, though I think that’s a good one.  This was a slightly smaller dream: I wanted to be a novelist.  For almost all of my writing career, that’s always how I thought of it, in the past tense: I wanted to be a novelist. 

One day, after an intense period of navel-gazing, I thought, what if I moved that sentence into the present tense: I want to be a novelist.  And then what if I did something about it?

So I did something about it.  And my first novel, Then Will Come Night and Darkness was published by a small literary publisher not too long after that.  So that was good, right?  I was now a published novelist.  But of course that was not enough.  The idea mutated.  (My ideas are like very scary science fiction creatures in this regard.)  The idea became, I want to write lots of novels. I  want to be a successful novelist. I want to be a professional novelist.  This is what I want my work to be.

Well, this idea was so scary I had to clean out the bedroom closet AND the kitchen cupboards.  But once the idea had gotten into my brain it refused to get out again.  I told it all the reasons it had to leave: I had work I enjoyed, bills to pay, a daughter to raise, and no clue whether I have what it takes to be a successful novelist.  Even so, the idea wouldn’t leave.  It kept whispering, If you don’t do this now, when will you?  If you’re not willing to take the risk, then you don’t have what it takes, do you?  You’re making up excuses, you loser.  That’s spelled capital L-O-S-E-R!  (The little voice in my brain can be very mean to me.)

So for the past several years, I have been scribbling on mountains of paper, writing novels and learning the craft.  To make room for the dream, I’m doing less nonfiction work and fewer speaking engagements and workshops.  My daughter and I are making do with less of everything and finding out that we never needed more of everything in the first place.

So far I have had two novels accepted by Avalon (one published in 2008, one out later this year) under my pen name Jenny Jacobs.  I have also had enough rejections to render me catatonic if I thought about it very long.  Every six months or so, I do some soul-searching: Wouldn’t you like to, you know, have some retirement savings?  Or, I don’t know, own a car that was made after the turn of the century? And then I hold that up to the dream, and the dream is bigger than a new car or retirement savings.  I’m not saying it should be, or that my choice is smart.  I’m just saying what is true.

I still don’t know if I have what it takes, but I’m pretty sure I’ll find out before I’m dead.  In the meantime . . . what dream did you have that you should move into the present tense?

“True originality eschews its trappings.”  That’s about the only thing Freud ever said that I agree with.  Being a creative person — writing books, painting pictures, developing the theory of evolution — is incredibly time-consuming.  It’s hard.  It’s an awful lot of work.  If you’re spending all of your time on appearances, on the trappings, you simply don’t have enough left over to do the work. 

A few days ago, a writer I follow on Twitter sent out a link to a wonderful essay by Jennifer Crusie on protecting the work.  I first read this essay several years ago, and it resonated with me because I have always been a firm believer in finding your Three Most Important Things, and doing those, and not really anything else.  Jennifer Crusie has a similar approach to setting priorities and making sure she is working on them and not on things that don’t matter.  So we will pause for a moment while you read the Other Jennifer.

Back so soon? Now I want to connect the idea of protecting your work with some information that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (of Flow fame) writes about in his book Creativity.  This book is actually more useful than Flow for creative types who are interested in developing best practices for their work.  Although it came out in 1996, every sentence in it is as relevant now as it was then.

For our purposes today, here’s the concept that most interests me: in interviewing creative types for the book, Mihaly (yes, I’m being overly familiar but I’m not typing that last name more than once) found that they had fairly conformist lives outside their work.  Why?  Because it’s simpler.  And having a complicated life is the enemy of creative work.  Now, neither Mihaly nor I contend that this is true of all creative people throughout history, but for a good portion of them, a key ingredient to their success is not having to pay much attention to life outside their work.  Creative people, whatever their field, need a lot of unstructured time for staring out the window and coming up with the Unified Theory of Everything or at least this week’s plot twists.  Time spent trying to figure out how to update WordPress is not conducive to this endeavor (as I can attest from personal experience).  

Keeping life outside work simple doesn’t mean you should send your kids off to boarding school, nor does it mean you will never see Paris again.  It simply means the more we can build habits into our lives, the more time we have for the creative work.  Here’s the thing: every morning I get up, brush my teeth, take a shower, get dressed.  Depending on my habits, this can take fifteen minutes or it can take two hours.  It used to take two hours, because first there was the necessity for hitting the snooze alarm a time or ten (I am not a morning person), then of staggering out of bed and finding the coffee pot.  Then trying to remember what I did with the toothbrush, and discovering I was out of toothpaste, so now what.  Not to mention blow drying and styling the hair, putting on the makeup, picking out the right clothes, putting them back, picking out other right clothes, discovering the stain on the shirt that I meant to do something about but forgot — well, you can see why I had to get up at 5:45 to make it to work by 8:30.

When I realized how much time all this dithering took, and how much it ate into the little time I had for doing the work I wanted to do, I simplified it.  I got up when the alarm went off, period (despite the fact that I am still not a morning person).  I changed my wardrobe so that everything I owned went with everything else and everything fit.  If you look in my closet now, you will see four pairs of shoes: loafers, boots, casual sandals, dressy sandals.  That’s it.  I spend no time in making decisions about my clothes at home; all of the decisions are made at the store before I buy a single thing.

I make these kinds of habits in all areas of my life.  I put the keys and my wallet in a dish by the door every time I come into the house.  That way I know where they are every time I leave, and I don’t have to spend time or energy thinking about it.  Anything I have to take with me (a check to mail, a book to return to the library) goes by the wallet and keys so that they’re never forgotten.  I do the laundry every Saturday morning and only every Saturday morning.  It is washed, dried, and put away before my daughter and I go off on our Saturday afternoon adventure.  I have the Schwan’s guy deliver most of my groceries (on Wednesdays).  The things he can’t deliver I can pick up on my way home from dropping Jessica off at school. I do that on Tuesdays.  The dishes are loaded into the dishwasher and the kitchen cleaned every evening after dinner, no matter what.  I don’t own a television so I don’t have to try to make and enforce rules about when and where television shows can be watched.  (I call that a nonhabit.)       

This approach may sound overly rigid and too orderly for a free spirit like you, and that’s exactly what I thought before I started making these changes.  The thing is, the management of our lives eats up a lot of time if we let it.  If developing the habit of doing the laundry every Saturday and only every Saturday sounds like something only a drill sergeant could love, consider this: It’s not like there’s another way to get the laundry done that’s going to be more fulfilling.  But not having a habit guarantees that laundry issues will become a lot more frustrating and time-consuming.  For example, when you don’t do it regularly, you run out of clean underwear.  If you don’t put it away routinely, you have to dig through piles of clean laundry in a basket to pull out the insanely wrinkled shirt you were planning to wear for that important presentation. And so on.

Developing these habits not only helps you free up time elsewhere in your schedule, it gives you ways to protect your time by shunting those habits into their specified zones.  If you do the laundry on Saturday mornings, that means that Sunday through Friday mornings you are free to work on your book or your painting or your garden without thinking, Gee, I really need to get the laundry done.  The habit ensures that you will get the chore done and that you don’t have to do it at any other time.  Giving yourself the gift of mental space is just as important as giving yourself the gift of time.

Next time: Protecting the work by outsourcing.

My daughter spent a couple of days in doctors’ offices last week, which, unfortunately, is a fact of her life.  This is always stressful for both of us, but one thing I never have to worry about is asking the boss for a day off work to attend to such matters (I freelance for the Salkind Agency, in case you were wondering how that worked.) 

One of the tremendous benefits of being a freelancer is the ability to make your work fit around your life instead of the other way around.  I’ve been a freelancer for about fifteen years, and during that time, I’ve occasionally wandered into the world of job ads.  (Every freelancer gets frustrated now and then and thinks the answer is a staff job.)  I read through the qualifications list, checking them off, and then I get to the “benefits” list and try to imagine making my life work with five days’ sick leave and a week’s vacation each year.

It is to laugh.  My life wouldn’t fit in those parameters.  It couldn’t. 

That isn’t to say that being a freelancer is easier than being a staffer (zeus knows it’s not).  Nor is it to say that people who have staff jobs have it easy, what with knowing how much their weekly paycheck is going to be.  Just that trying to make work and life fit together is a challenge for all of us, and it involves a lot of tradeoffs.  I don’t have to worry about asking my boss for time off, but I also don’t get paid vacation, or sick leave, or employer-provided health insurance.  Someone who has a staff job has to figure out how to care for the sick kid on the same day they’re supposed to close that big new account. 

Now add in creative pursuits (we’re up to work + life + creative pursuits) and no wonder people feel they can’t achieve their dreams.  It’s a lot of work and sometimes it’s just easier and more rewarding to turn on the television.  In the short-run, anyway.

The biggest help for me, in making it all fit together, is to do combine tasks as much as possible.  I schedule all my phone calls in the same couple of afternoons each week.  I answer all agency queries once a week in a big batch.  I run all my errands at the same time. I even schedule seeing my friends that way (I have been known to sit in the coffee shop for five hours, meeting with one friend after another.)

What’s your secret?