Disruptions
When best laid plans go awry
I am, at my heart, a planner.
Every Monday morning, I sit down with a physical planner and take an overview of the week. Every day I make to do lists, and methodically cross things off as the hours go by. It helps me bring some order to everyday chaos everyone deals with.
It is hardly a surprise then that, when it comes to writing a new book, one of the first things I’ll do is plan out my time. Faced with a fresh calendar, I will try my best to figure out what the book might require. How much time will I need for research and plotting? What is a realistic amount of words I can write per day to get a draft done, and how many grace period days do I need for when life or random colds knock me off my pace? How much time do I need to self-edit a first draft before I can feel passably good about sending it to my editor?
Does any of this book planning ever go perfectly? Absolutely not.
Am I still trying to find a sweet spot where I’m realistic about how much I can write and missing word count targets doesn’t stress me out? 100% yes.
Can I entirely throw word counts and planning out the window? Tried it and it made me even more stressed because my ex-journalist brain loves and hates the pressure of a deadline in equal measure.
But what happens when it all goes off the rails because something completely unprecedented (like putting your life on pause to move out of your flat and into a temporary home while you sort out a house purchase as I am currently doing) drops like an anvil through your plans?
Well, I can tell you right now that I’m figuring that out.
When your bookshelves look like this, you know it’s serious.
The first thing I did when it became clear that having a moving day and a first draft deadline fall about seven weeks apart was going to be a spicy little challenge to start the summer was just stop. Moving needed attention, so I focused on that rather than agonizing over producing crummy words that I knew I’d need to wholesale delete when life quieted down a bit. I did what I could and then put work aside for about a week and a half. Then, when I got back to my (new) writing desk, I stripped away everything that was not essential.
One of the things you discover very quickly when you become a published author is that the writing of the book is only one part of the work.1 You also have editing, copy editing, proofreading, marketing, social media, answering reader emails, paying invoices, doing accounting, filing taxes. The list goes on.
When things become pressed around a deadline, I intentionally drop things that normally I would prioritize every day or week. Instead of writing for Substack, drafting social media copy, reading for research, and answering reader emails2, the focus becomes the first draft and only the first draft because no amount of careful planning is going to buy me back rapidly diminishing time.
In this kind of situation, which I am in right now, I will temporarily push my word counts past the normal 2,000 to 3,000 words per day that feel comfortable. For example, on Monday of this week, I wrote 4,614 words. On Tuesday, I wrote 4,570 words.
Is this healthy? No, not in the long-term. I can sustain this kind of production for only so long before my brain starts to slow down like an overloaded computer. Push myself too hard for too long and burnout rears its head3. However, for a short period of time, I actually enjoy this amount of daily writing because it feels like I’m writing on fire. Like I can’t type fast enough to get the words out. I get to be single-minded about focusing on my writing and just enjoying getting the story on the page.
Writing is a job just like any job. There are constantly things pulling on your attention. Sometimes the best feeling in the world is dropping all of it to do the actual work that you love, the writing of the book.
Sometimes it feels as though it is only one very small sliver of it.
Sorry to anyone I owe an email back to…
This is something I would never encourage myself or another author to do. Burnout is serious and should be treated with great respect.