Muse and Mischief

Most writers and artists will tell you, it’s a challenge balancing your life and your art. While many of us would love to spend countless hours just creating, it just isn’t feasible if we want to live a healthy life. Especially since a lot of our inspiration to create comes from, well our lives and experiences. 

I will admit it took me longer than I should have taken to learn this lesson. Several years ago I thought I needed large blocks of time to write or paint. So if I couldn’t section off two hours or more then I didn’t work. Not sustainable. My work suffered. My skills grew weaker. My mental health suffered. This was about two years ago. 

I had been a project manager for several years by this point and one day I had a moment of clarity. My day job consisted of managing tasks and time to build a schedule that allowed my projects to reach their milestones and goals. What was stopping me from putting that same thinking towards my creative work? 

Me. I was stopping me. 

So I sat down with an idea I had been toying with for several months and made a plan. I turned my novel into a project. I mapped out all of my pre-planning work such as worldbuilding, research, and character creation. I set realistic timelines for these and picked a date where I would start drafting the manuscript. I was only able to carve out a guaranteed hour each weekday on my lunch break to write and this time I committed to doing as much as I could in that time. 

I started really slow, barely hitting 500 words the first couple days. It was cumbersome, uncomfortable, and completely foreign to me. The words just weren’t coming, but I still did, everyday day that week. Then something changed. My mind adjusted and the words started coming. Within a couple weeks I was hitting a solid 1k words minimum each day. I even had a couple 2k days. It may have taken me about 6 months to finish that first draft, but I finished it. 

Treating my novel like a project really opened my eyes on how to do what a lot of successful indie authors recommend. Treat your craft like a business. For me this wasn’t so much focusing on profit as much as it was about structure. 

What I found from writing my first novel is that I did really well with structuring my time out. So I started doing it with other aspects of my life. I had already carved out time to write each weekday. Next I carved out time for admin tasks like setting up my website, working on my online platform, and related items. The weekends were off limits except for my writing group I attend every other weekend for two hours. Now I am working art back into my life so I can put my Art degree to use again. I’m setting aside an hour or two each week to work on creative projects. 

What is really helping me to manage everything without losing my mind is that this plan is also flexible. If need to put more hours into writing one week I shift time around and then make up for it in the following weeks. I also schedule out my admin work to where I focus on one aspect each weekday. It may seem chaotic from the outside, but it’s been several months and I have been thriving with it so far. 

I think devoting more time to painting and drawing is also helping to regulate myself. I am finding that painting recharges my batteries for writing and writing does the same for painting. Both of those recharge my batteries for admin work. It’s like it’s own little ecosystem. 

It is a challenge to find a balance amongst the different aspects of our lives. Structure works for me, it might work for you or it might not. There is a way to find that balance though and I think the key is to not let one aspect of your life dominate the others. When that happens it can throw us off kilter and affect us in ways we would rather avoid.