Ten Tips for Writing Around a Day Job
How to commit to writing while also letting go.
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I’ve written poems since I was about 19. But I didn’t start to write with consistency, regularity, and commitment until about five years ago – I have only really developed the capacity to work on sustained prose projects the last three years. The problem when I was younger was that I had high expectations of myself; my efforts were stultified under the weight of pressure I mounted on my own back. This pressure was mirrored by the sheer extent of my ambitions: I mostly had plenty of ideas and time but my capacity to use it diminished as the size of my ambitions grew. I needed to write something genius that would change the world. Restless and frayed by anxiety, I had no practical aptitude with which to ground myself in the gritty work of writing, and therefore no space to improve.
It takes time and discipline to practise and to learn technique. And who’s time isn’t strained? In spite (or perhaps, also, because) of the continued and constant demands on my time, what has helped me to write is chilling out, shifting the scale of my expectations (chilling out doesn’t mean you don’t improve, it actually makes you better prepared to face the work of improvement). Strangely, and I want to write about this, undergoing a long process of therapy dramatically altered my capacity to write.
Now, I work full time and I have to make time to write. I know this is a difficult situation for a lot of people so I wanted to share some tips about what’s helped me. My advice probably doesn’t apply to all the people reading this. But my dear old friend Chloe White, an incredible documentary filmmaker, told me that my last substack of writing tips prompted her to start writing a novel. I was thrilled. So, in no particular order here’s my ten tips for writing around a day job.
Ten Tips for Writing around a Day Job
Change the scale of expectations
During lockdowns I was working from home, mostly doing well paid private tutoring over Zoom with a student who never turned up. That meant I had whole days free to write. Now I’ve got a 9-5 and the mornings before work, the evenings, and the weekends are when I am free. When you have less time than you are perhaps used to having, you just have to accept that you aren’t going to finish something as quickly as you hope, especially if you want it to be good. Your projects are just going to take longer – that’s perfectly fine.
Focus on using the time you have
Don’t get lost thinking about the time you don’t have. Sometimes you will have time, other times you won’t. Writing a bit is better than writing nothing. What’s more, some of my best ideas or passages came from squeezing a bit of writing time from a train journey or jotting a few ideas down while I was on the bus in my notes on my phone. The first bit you write on any one day is always going to be shit too – that’s why the delete button exists, so don’t be afraid of getting started.
Read whatever you want
Sometimes it’s the unexpected that can spur you on. To develop my novel, I’ve read quite broadly in contemporary fiction. Now, most of contemporary fiction is intolerably bad and stupid but I have discovered writers I like: Nell Zink, Torrey Peters, Gary Indiana, Brontez Purnell. And from each of them I learned something. What’s more, I have read broadly in the realms of the literature on creative writing, something that in the past I’d have been very resistant to doing. Samuel Delany’s About Writing is the best book I’ve found. Patricia Highsmith’s Writing and Plotting Suspense Fiction is a blast. I even learned something from reading Stephen King’s On Writing (I might write another post about these kinds of books and their limits and uses).
Believe that you can do it
Most books are terrible, hopefully your book will be better than terrible. To be honest, writing can be such a challenge that I’m impressed by anyone who has finished a novel in particular. The timeline of development and improvement for writing is long. To give just one small example, I abandoned my first attempt at a novel after writing 30k words because the first chapter was awful and the last I’d written was great – because I learned so much while writing it. But if hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others can write a novel, why can’t you?
Be in the reality of your doubt
We all feel doubt, it’s like the tides. Sometimes you will look at your writing and think it is the worst thing in the world. You’ll put the whole project in the bin for a month, and when you retrieve it your perspective may have changed. My friend Toby once said that doubt doesn’t have to be believed to be a threat to the entirety of the project that you’re doubting (whether it’s a relationship or a novel), but that by moving through doubt you can come back to certainty anew. That’s just how we keep things fresh.
Create a routine
Setting an amount of time to write each day, or on certain days can really help. Quantity is never a definition of worth but projects need to get done all the same. Let’s say you can write a hundred words, or two hundred words, in 30 minutes before you start working. If you do that five times a week, that’s 500-1000 words a week. Not bad. Equally important is where you work, having a special place where you feel you can dive into your project.
Break a routine
Sometimes the fortress of routine that you’ve constructed to get stuff done becomes the thing that makes things more difficult. The poet Edmund Hardy once told me he was suffering from a writing block. He sat on the other side of his desk and this small rearrangement of the furniture opened him up again. It could be going to a cafe, working in a new room, writing on paper instead of pen, but sometimes shaking up habits is as motivating as cultivating the habit itself.
Make sacrifices, just not the same ones each time
This is the one I find hardest. I have a job, a busy social life, a flat to maintain, I like to exercise, and now lots of small writing deadlines. This means it’s harder to find time. I usually have to drop one thing for a few weeks, I just make sure it’s not always the same thing.
Start a writing group
More so than with poetry, I need feedback and drafts and edits from my friends. During the harsh lockdown of the beginning of 2021, my friend Holly created a Zoom writing group which ran for over a year, meeting one evening a fortnight. The other four participants were all strangers to me and now are all friends. For me the strength of the group was that I had the most academic approach to writing itself. The rest of the group had more experience of writing through journalism, art, cultural criticism, and this made them the perfect readers for giving me the feedback and that time. Everyone in the group was also a fantastic writer and we all created friendships in a challenging time (One person from the group, Madeleine Stack, is launching her book of poetry at Horse Hospital on 8th December). To be honest the writing group was probably the best thing that happened in my life during the pandemic.
Create deadlines
Self-directed deadlines give you a structure to achieve and often I find I fall short of them. Nevertheless, they’re necessary because they help you get a sense of how much you actually get done, and then you can readjust them. I find external deadlines, like submission windows and competitions, much more helpful because I’m less likely to miss them. These external deadlines have also led to rigorous redrafting of work. Most of your work is not going to be accepted, so when it’s rejected you can come back to the piece afresh.
Writing is an absolute slog. I hope these ten tips can help you draw up the strength to get started. Commitment comes in stages and moves through doubts, too. Bon courage!