Pacing Yourself

Last week, I wore about tension and I mentioned that you can’t keep tension at its highest all the time, that you need to give your audience time to relax a little after high-tension, high-stakes scenes. The same, however, goes for you as well. You need time to relax and recover when you’re writing, in order to be able to keep it up long-term.

When you’re creative, there will always be times of high creativity, where the new ideas bubble up constantly and you want to work all the time on the stuff you’re thinking about, no matter whether you’re a writer, a painter, or a composer. Yet, there’s also a good reason not to dive head-first into the newest project and ignore all creature comforts or other things in your life.

 

It’s both easy to work too hard and to be too lazy when you’re self-employed. There’s no boss who tells you to work harder when you’re slacking off or a contractual number of hours you need to work before going home. When you’re self-employed, you often work from home, so there’s not even a physical distance between your workplace and your home.

Therefore, it’s of great importance for you to learn how to pace yourself, both to avoid slacking off without a boss breathing down your neck and to avoid exhausting yourself and having to take time off to recover when you can least afford it. If you pace yourself, you will make good headways with your projects, yet you won’t be exhausted or neglect other aspects of your life.

 

The first thing you need to do is to figure out how much work you can realistically do in a certain time frame (a day, a week, a month). You can’t just focus on your writing (or other creative pursuit), there’s other things in your life, too. You might have a full-time job to juggle and there are also friends and family to spend time with. Sit down and write down what you do every day - create a timetable for every day of the week, if you can. Look at free time you have, once all you need to do in a day is accounted for. Gauge how much of that you would realistically be able to set aside for your project. Then figure out how much of the project you could do in that time.

You won’t be able to use that time for your project every day, of course. Life happens and changes our plans. Yet, you will in general be able to use this time for your project and you can gauge how long the project might take you to finish with that amount of time at your disposal. That is helpful, because you can plan this way, can see when you’ll finally have your first draft, second draft, final draft in your hands. When you can present your book to the world. It’s motivating to know that you’ll be done and, ideally, when you might be done.

 

Next, figure out how long you can work in one go without exhausting yourself. It’s of no use to you to work five hours (in addition to your full-time job) every day for a week, only to be so exhausted that you can hardly drag yourself out of bed afterwards or can hardly look at your project without despising it. Take the time you think you can work without a break and then take five or ten minutes off that - people tend to over-estimate what they can do in one go.

Find a rhythm for your work. Do so many minutes of writing, staying focused, and then take so many minutes off for a break. Set yourself clear goals for a day, write that many words or that many chapters (if your chapters are similar in length). Figure out a rhythm which is comfortable for you. It should be manageable every day, hence I suggested not going with the maximum of time you’re certain you can work for without a break. It should not be too long, either. It’s better to do a few shorter ‘work-break’ cycles than to do a longer one which leaves you more tired in the end.

 

Personally, I do like the pomodoro method for pacing myself. It’s comprised of 25 minutes of focused work, 5 minutes of a short break, and, after four cycles, a 15-minute break instead of the 5-minute one.

25 minutes of focused writing aren’t that hard to do. The 5 minutes give me time to stretch, walk around a bit, make myself a coffee or go to the loo. I usually don’t really take the 15-minute break most days, because I usually need three ‘work-break’ cycles for a chapter and I take time to read it through afterwards, which comes with a longer break. Yet, if the situation is like that, if I reach those four cycles and will continue, I do make use of the longer break to reset myself a little.

Think about this: if you do four of those cycles and the 15-minute break, you will have worked for 100 minutes and have taken 30 minutes of a break (three times 5 and one time 15 minutes). You will not be overly exhausted, taking a break after 25 minutes of work, and will have gotten a lot done. You will probably be able to work for another four cycles afterwards if you have the whole day at your disposal.

 

There will be times in your life when you will have to re-evaluate your time and see what new targets are realistic. You might have more time to work on your projects or less, you might have to change your approach (I started out as a discovery writer and am plotting by now), or you might have to change how much you can do before you become exhausted. Life is change and changes are inevitable. Don’t try to force yourself to stay with your current methods if they’re no longer working - change them instead.

 

It’s less easy for a discovery writer to pace themselves when the inspiration has struck them and they know precisely how the next couple of scenes should work out, but discovery writers have a ‘natural’ pacing built in, because there will always be those times when they can’t write because the rest of the story isn’t ‘ready’ yet. If you’re a discovery writer, try not to overdo it, but if the inspiration comes, ride with it.

 

Pacing yourself helps you to pull through with projects more easily. Knowing how much you can realistically do in a month helps you with estimating how long a project will take you. Having a certain quota to meet in a day or a week keeps you motivated - if it is realistic and can be reached most of the time. Do not exhaust yourself, you’ll get much more done when you’re going at a slower steady pace. That goes for writing as well as for long-distance running. What’s good for a marathon, is also good for a manuscript. Pace yourself and reach your goal!