Is this familiar to you? You’re ready to write, and you’re keen to dive into your work in progress, but first, you need to:
- Tidy your desk
- Research a fact
- Reply to those outstanding emails
- Check your socials
- Check yesterday’s book sales
- Clean the kitchen
- Do the laundry
- Walk the dog
- Call the accountant
- Bake the cupcakes for the school fundraiser
- Insert any number of variable Things To Do here…
When the decks are clear, then we can focus on the writing and get it done.
We’ve all been guilty of wanting to wait until conditions are perfect, or at least stable, so that we can sink into the writing flow without the distraction of everything else just sitting there, waiting, needing to be done.
But here’s the (possibly annoying) truth: we don’t need to clear the decks to write. You can write and focus with all of those other things still there waiting, still there needing to be done.
A Note About Demands
Before we jump in to exploring some ideas on how NOT to clear the decks before we start writing, I want to address the fact that some of us are wired to want to clear up demands, all the demands, in one go simply because we don’t do well with demands. Demands of any kind make some of us anxious and irritable, and we need them all to go away as quickly as possible. This is something I deal with constantly, and have only recently learned that it’s part of my neurodivergent head wiring.
For me, when I let demands sit there and wait, it’s like I can almost physically feel them pushing against me. It’s distracting, it’s uncomfortable, and sometimes distressing. But my strategy is to think of this discomfort as the price to pay for the incredible reward that my writing brings. And that’s so much more valuable in so many more ways than making sure that all of my minute, day-to-day demands are taken care of before I start writing.
The demands are necessary to run a generally put-together life. The writing is necessary to live in that life as a whole, fulfilled, content, calm, self. The first one can wait. It’s not good for anyone in my life if the second one waits.
Like everything I write about the creative writing life, take the advice if it feels good, try it, adapt it, or completely ignore it to suit whatever your needs may be. Also like so much of what I write about the writing life, I’m writing this article as a message to myself for when the demands get too loud and pushy.
How To Get The Writing Done First
1. Recognize That The Decks Are Never, Ever Clear
I often “joke” to my kids that our laundry basket is magical because no matter how many times I empty it, it’s NEVER empty (they NEVER laugh at this joke!). The same goes for all household tasks, for email, for errands. It’s all never ending. Housework, errands, day-to-day minutia, it’s all cyclical. You’re never truly done with the housework, you’ve just completed a cycle and the next round is already beginning in the same instant. Let the cycle stretch a little longer.
Then comes The Big End we all get to. What would you rather have done at that end of your life: written your novels, or done a lot of laundry and replied to a lot of email? There’s still going to be laundry and probably email to do after you’ve taken your final breaths, but that unwritten novel of yours has gone into eternity too.
2. Identify If Anything Seriously Does Need Doing
There are some things in life that do actually genuinely need to happen before we sit down to write. Children need feeding, medication needs administering, kitchen fires need extinguishing, toilets need using. Examine your deck for the truly immediate needs. Get it done fast and early. Most things we face are not in this urgent category.
(Real Life Snapshot – As I write the first draft of this article, my children are downstairs waiting to be fed breakfast. No one is complaining (yet), so I’m letting that wait for a while longer so I can write. What’s better: the fulfilled mother who comes to help her children with a light, fulfilled spirit, or the anxious and overwhelmed mother who comes to help her children in begrudging annoyance? Update from the second draft – no one starved, everyone was happy.)
2. Face Overwhelm Head On
When we have a mountain of minute To Dos playing on our minds, we’re usually beset with a sense of overwhelm, even if we don’t consciously recognize it. Attempting to clear the decks gives an illusion of control over this overwhelm. It calms the anxiety and gives us the sense that we’ve got everything in hand. I used to feel guilty about what many would call being a “control freak” but have since realized that even the attempt to control, even when I know it’s an illusion, makes me feel good. So what’s the harm in feeling good? The harm comes in pushing away what’s vital in order to feel this control. The harm comes in not getting my writing done, my books finished, because not writing creates a much greater anxiety.
So, accept the overwhelm. Face it. Feel it in your body. Give it a gentle and loving acknowledgement, and promise it that you’re going to get to The Other Stuff after you’ve had some quality writing time.
3. Recognize Your Writing Might Also Be Overwhelming
So we’ve just settled the anxiety and overwhelm from all of that other To Do stuff, but what happens when we come to face our writing and the writing project in itself feels overwhelming and intimidating? Better just calm down a bit and clear the mind by putting a load of laundry on, right? Not quite…
It’s natural to shut down or retreat when facing a significant task, especially when that significant task has all kinds of layers of identity, fulfillment, and self-worth, not to mention the actual technical difficulty of writing good work. There’s A LOT riding on our writing. But again, this task is existentially more important than most other things on our decks, so it has to come first. Just like in the step above, we face the overwhelm. We notice it by noticing the urge to do other things first. And we feel it in our bodies and let it be there without fear or judgement. We feel uncomfortable because the writing matters.
4. Confront Old Habits
What do you usually do before sitting down to write? Social media and email are two common habits many of us do before opening the work in progress. If you have any of these kinds of habits baked in as precursors to actually getting the work done, they might give some resistance when you first attempt to bypass them and hit the writing first. That’s fine. Resistance is uncomfortable, but it’s not dire. Just notice the feeling, acknowledge it’s there, and it’s completely normal, and get into writing without succumbing to the old habit. I know, totally easier said than done, right? Just try as best you can. That’s all you owe yourself.
5. Adopt A Sense of Play
Writing and creativity are fun! It’s a playful moment to make up a story, even if the content of that story is anything but playful. Instead of coming to your writing as a serious task that needs doing, come to it with a sense of frivolity as a super cool thing that you get to do. Which also happens to be serious and important. But y’know, not in the same way as emailing your accountant is serious and important. This playfulness will lighten the work, help you face and make space for any overwhelm you’re feeling, and generally make you feel good all over.
6. Small Steps
Novelists don’t sit down and write a novel. We sit down and write one word at a time. Remembering that a writing project is a series of small and smaller actions can help us face the overwhelm of getting the job done, and further help us resist the urge to think we’re making it easier by eliminating other life stresses first.
7. Presence
A lot of the above boils down to the idea of presence. Being present in a situation is often all we need to overcome the overwhelm of either all the pressing life stuff or the writing project itself. Feel your feelings in the moment. Focus on your writing actions (sitting, typing, thinking etc) in the moment as they are happening. Notice the feelings of wanting to clear the decks in the moment. Be present with all of it, because it’s all happening right then, so it’s the only thing that’s real. The urge to do, to fix, to complete, to make space for some future version of you that will sit down to write later, it all exists at some place other than the present. Be present in the present. Write now.
Life stuff keeps on happening. It will be there after we write, and it will come up again after we clear the decks. It’s cyclical with no beginning and end. The laundry basket will never empty, and yes, there will be a breaking point where I need to address it. But if we come to all of these other life tasks full of the satisfaction and reward that getting our writing done brings, then these tasks won’t feel like such onerous demands that we have to begrudge, and we’ll be able to move through them, and everything else in our world with a lighter, gladder, more enlivened heart.
