Helloooooo Wrimos!
Let’s see if this scenario is familiar to you:
You want to do something… say, write a novel. You go to work all day, then after work you run all your errands, then you come home and maybe have to deal with the exceedingly foul emissions of a very old cat (just me?), then you cook dinner and clean up and send the last email of the day and finally—finally—it’s seven o’clock.
It’s your time.
Time to write. You promised yourself you would write for one hour every day and get that novel written, and now… here we go!
But the very thought of sitting down to write makes you want to cry. Instead, you crawl into bed, put on the latest episode of Love is Blind, and play an idle game on your phone for a few hours until you are ready to go to sleep, hours you could have spent writing, and why didn’t you? After all, you had the time, right? If you have time to lean, you have time to write… right?
No.
Because it’s not about time.
It’s about energy.
You, like all of us, have a finite amount of energy that you have to spend in any given day. Some people have more energy, and some have less. For example, people with children give a good chunk of their daily energy to their children. People who are caregivers, or have chronic health conditions, or work a demanding job will also have a big chunk of their allotted daily energy taken up by those situations.
It’s not a fault. It’s just how it is. You are spending 100% of your energy well before you “have the time” in your day to write, and that’s why you just… can’t.
Except… you can. You just have to stop thinking in terms of time, and start thinking in terms of energy, and how you might preserve (or regenerate) a chunk of that energy and use it to write.
Here’s how you do it.
- Keep an energy journal. For a few days, write down what you do, and how your energy waxes and wanes throughout the day. You may find that you have the most energy in the morning, or maybe you’re a night owl. Setting aside writing time during those hours, if possible, is a great way to ride that wave of extra energy to make reaching your creative goals easier.
- Take note of how your various activities make you feel. What energizes you, and what drains your energy? If going for a run energizes you, try to work that into your day and maybe do that before your writing time.
- Once you have a sense of your best hours, and what energizes and drains you, minimize your drains and maximize your generation. If you find that talking to a particular person in your life drains you, avoid that person while you’re writing. Do you hate doing dishes so much that it kills your battery? If possible, ask someone who loves you to take over that chore during the months while you’re writing, or hire a cleaning service if you have the resources. Think creatively about how you might rework your lifestyle to create the energetic space to write.
- Write!
This sounds simple, but it isn’t. This takes a lot of inner work and you’re already doing NaNo on top of everything you were doing before NaNo, so your available time and energy for inner work may be at a minimum. But even if all you get from this exercise is, for example, the knowledge that you gain energy through writing in community (a place where NaNoWriMo shines), then that in itself can be a dynamic-changing realization. Whatever you discover doing this exercise, use that knowledge to maximize the things that feed your energy and minimize the things that drain your energy.
Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up. One of the most reliable energy-generators is self-compassion. If you can be kind to yourself as often as possible, that alone will bring energetic dividends for you.
All right. Have fun, and go write!
—Lani
Lani Diane Rich is… wait for it… the first previously unpublished author to get a book deal from a NYC publisher with a NaNoWriMo book. She is also living proof that if you stuff enough detail into a sentence, you can make a claim to fame out of pretty much anything. She is a NYT bestselling author of 12 novels, an award-winning podcaster, and the unwitting owner of three cats. (It was a Brady Bunch situation; what are you gonna do?) Lani is a story expert who teaches the Year of Writing Magically, a life-changing, 10-month novel-writing workshop that helps writers build a process tailored to them while working in a small, tight-knit, supportive community. In the Year, Lani walks the cohort through mindset, discovery, drafting, revision, feedback, and publishing options, all while wrestling her own novel to the ground right alongside everyone else. You can learn more about Lani at lanidianerich.com. She is grateful and proud to have had her life changed by NaNoWriMo, and hopes that you have your life changed by it, too.