Balancing Act

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I think one of the hardest things to achieve in life is balance. We realize we’re going too far in one direction and we end up pushing the pendulum hard, and then it swings past the middle and right on over to the other side.

Right now I’m striving for balance in time, trying to be a domestic bushido warrior and slay all the invading armies of dust and dog hair that enter my house daily, and then write and podcast to actually make a living. The week I tried to focus on the housework, the writing suffered. Which is opposite the usual, which is writing all day and then being too tired to clean. Then I take a shower and wonder why I leave feeling dirtier than when I entered.

As a freelancer, balancing free and work time is also a challenge. When your office is your home, it’s extremely difficult to turn off the mindset that you can just get one more thing done. My day should be done when my daughter comes home from school, but often I try to squeeze in one more thing while she plays outside, which inevitably makes dinner late. Then I think I’ll get something done when she goes to bed, and my mind just flat out refuses. The other side is when I’m tired or sick (not really sick, just the kind of day that you’d suck up and go to the office if you had a day job) and don’t feel like working and end up on the couch with my computer, pretending to work while watching Netflix streaming. “They have ‘A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur HELL?’ This will help me concentrate while I write. Totally.”

One of the biggest balancing acts that we face these days is the fact that writers no longer have to live lives of solitude. If you told Emily Dickinson that her shut-in-life wouldn’t have to be if she just turned on AIM on her typewriter or notebook. As a woman who lived her social life in correspondence, I’m convinced she would have been an Internet junkie. We’re no longer alone, which is a blessing and a curse. We all know it’s best to turn off chat and the like when we write, but how many actually do it? And when we do, how many of us have a little voice in the back of our head saying, “I wonder what we’re missing online while we’re  here, alone?”

There are also workshops, communities, facebook groups, chats, twitter hashtag discussions, forums, blogs, and all sorts of places we can go to talk about writing. Talking about writing and creativity is fine, and finding a kindred spirit is almost magical when you can brainstorm and swap ideas. It’s useful, especially if you’re stuck. And if you’re alone and focusing on your creativity, that can be beneficial too. While my latest Artist’s Way experiment has failed spectacularly, I am a believer in the program to get to the root of your creativity, if you feel it stuck somewhere. Yeah, I know I mixed metaphors. I had Benadryl last night. Lemme ‘lone.

But talking about writing can easily become masturbation. It feels good, it’s easy, you can do it in 5 minutes or take a leisurely hour, and you feel like you accomplished something when you’re done. But it’s ultimately unproductive. It gets nothing done. Believe me- I do a show on writing, and it feels great. But I’m not seeing my wordcount increase as a result. You can listen to the writing shows and read the writing blogs and participate on the writing forums and meet with your writer’s group and IM brainstorm with your friends and never get word one written.

I don’t want to be a shut-in who lives in squalor and works all the time. I also don’t want to lounge in a sparkling clean house, watch TV, and chat online and never write again. Or any mixture of those. But whenever I see myself trending one way, I push back and sometimes go to far the other way. Balance is key. So I’ve tried to work out a schedule for myself, allowing for writing time, lunch time (oh yeah, I miss lunch a lot of the time, too), housework time, editing time, etc. So far the schedule has been difficult to follow to the letter, but it’s helping out better than sitting down at the computer, saying, “What should I work on first?” and then having a friend ping on IM for an hourlong chat.

Scheduling. We’ll see how that works out. But now my schedule says breakfast and a shower, and then some writing, so I’m off for the day. Good luck with your own balance.