Making Time

Sometimes, people ask me, “Melissa, how do you find the time to be creative when you have two kids?”

This is generally the cue for hysteria-tinged laughter.  Because finding time is not something I do.  I carve time ruthlessly out of the flesh of an angry T-Rex while clinging to the side of an out-of-control bullet train with one broken arm and an alligator clamped onto my leg.  And now that I’ve written that, I need to draw it, because those are the rules of this blog:

More specifically, for the first year after I had my first baby, I didn’t find time to do creative things.  It was the first time since I was about 7 years old that I wasn’t working on a book, and aside from taking some sporadic notes on certain ideas I had for a later project, I was practically creatively dead.

If you’ve ever had a small baby who never wants to be put down and NEVER EVER SLEEPS, you might understand why.  I actually learned to surf the internet with my toe while nursing.  And I got voice software, but let’s say the technology was far from perfect.

Things got a bit better as the baby got older.  Then, finally, my kids went to school, and suddenly, for the first time in years, I actually had a few hours a day to myself.

Quickly, I learned that if I wanted to get creative stuff done in the extremely limited time I had available, I had to cut almost all other leisure activities from my life.  I allowed myself virtually no movies, TV, or internet surfing; limited social media; and even (sob) drastically reduced reading time.  It was tough, but it let me get a little writing in every day.

However, I may have overdone it a bit.

Finding a balance where I could fit things like hygiene and actual time with my husband into a day along with parenting and creative projects was difficult, but at times I managed to succeed for a while... though it meant never getting to experience many things that sounded wonderful, like Zombieland or Downton Abbey.  (For the record, I do mean to correct those sad gaps in my cultural education at some point.)

Then employment struck.  Now I work for the entire time my kids are at school.  When they come home, I have to help them with homework, spend some good mommy time with them, make them dinner, bathe them when possible, and get them to bed at a reasonable hour. When they’re in bed, I finally get to write...

...Or do I?

And what have we learned today?

Chasing down a bullet train while clinging to a T-Rex is way cooler.

Breaking the Rose-Colored Glasses

It can be hard getting enough distance on my own writing to see it like a reader sees it.  This only makes sense — the story starts as this thing in my head, without words, and I have to find the words to describe it.  But when I read what I wrote, I still have my memories of the original, wordless source material, so I’m basically cheating.

On top of that, there’s the rose colored glasses factor.  Because early on in my relationship with a story, I’m still very much in love.

And you know how it is.  When you’re in love, you’re blind to your loved one’s flaws.

This can be a problem when it comes time to make edits.

The best way to get enough distance from my writing to look at it rationally is probably time.  For instance, I recently went back and reread a novel I wrote a couple years ago, and I found I could see the book in a far clearer light.  (For instance: BOY, did I overuse semicolons.)

Of course, the falling-out-of-love effect can go too far.  When I’ve been working on a book for a long time and have done a few editing passes, the bloom is sometimes well and truly off the rose.

This is no good, because I’ll want to stop editing just to be done with the darn thing, rather than because the book is as good as I can make it.

So I’ve tried to find other ways to take a fresh look at my writing, and to show myself things I’d never notice on my own.  I’ve found at least two that seem to be working very well.

One is simple, unbiased, and brutally effective.  I pasted the entire text of the novel I’m currently working on into Wordle.  (For those unfamiliar with this site, it creates word clouds from the most commonly used words in any piece of text, with the words appearing bigger the more often you use them.)  This is a great way to very quickly see what words you’re overusing.

It’s also a great way to immediately hate yourself.  Wordle doesn’t lie.  Wordle doesn’t soften the blow.

The other method I’ve used for getting a more distanced look at my writing is one I tried after hearing a writer friend mention doing it with her own work: my husband is kindly reading the whole book aloud to me.

This helps on a bunch of levels.  For one thing, I can hear my own language interpreted through someone else’s voice.  It’s much easier to spot awkward phrasing, places where I get too flowery for my own good, stiff dialogue, voice slippage, and so on.  Another way this is proving hugely helpful is with pacing.  When someone’s reading your work aloud, it’s painfully clear when you’re rambling on for too long.

Again, this technique can be painful, and this time there’s someone to witness your humiliation.  But hearing my words in someone else’s voice gets me that objective distance immediately.  Which is really useful when I’m getting ready to go into a big round of edits.

Remember, kids, running with scissors is dangerous.  Don't try this at home.

Of course, no matter what the ups and downs of my romance with a writing project, in the end, the result is always the same.

And what have we learned today?

That dress DOES make your book’s butt look fat.