The Time Conundrum

My critique group had its second meeting this past weekend, and, in addition to some great discussion of our work, we also bemoaned the great time conundrum. With jobs and families and life stuff--both ordinary and extraordinary, how on earth does a person find time to write?

I wrote my first novel in fits and starts, a few pages at a time, over five years, and it feels disjointed and jagged. My fractured time led to a fractured novel. I wrote my second novel while on sabbatical over a glorious period of about six weeks during which time nothing else demanded my attention between 9 am and 5 pm. It was luxurious and rare. This novel coheres.

I won't have such time again anytime soon, and most people never have it. So, how does one write a cohesive novel without cohesive time?

People have different strategies to keep themselves writing. Some are length based: two sentences per day or one page per day. Some are time based: fifteen minutes per day or before the kids get up. Others are incentive systems: chocolate comes at the end of a writing session. Others are community based: I tell you how much I will accomplish, and you tell me you much you will accomplish, and we hold each other accountable. These are all good systems, but none of them address the cohesion issue.

I can find a few minutes per day to write, but in that fragmented work model, I lose my rhythm, and then my book feels out of sync with itself. I need to find a way to maintain my groove when I'm not writing.

So here is a new strategy I am launching today: I will continue to grab at time to write, but when I'm not writing, I will carry my main character around with me. I will think about the challenges he faces in my fictional world, and I will also imagine how he would respond to the real world situations I move through. For example, when I walk into my classroom, I will ask myself, "Where would Micah sit? What would he think of today's reading?" When I go to the grocery store, I will think about what Micah would want to buy. My hope is that taking Micah with me in my real life will make it easier to get in touch with him when I sit down to write--I will never have been out of touch--and I may even discover scenarios that I want to work into my novel.

I will report back next week. For my first exercise, I ask myself what Micah thinks of this blog post. Turns out that he doesn't get blogs at all. Doesn't see the point. And so my character develops.

Platform, Platform, Platform

I read a lot of kid lit blogs, including many that feature interviews with industry professionals of all sorts. One of the most common questions in these interviews is some variation on this theme: how important is it for writers to develop an online platform? In this usage, "platform" describes having an online presence via the full range of social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Most of the writers who appear on these blogs or maintain them by definition have said platform. However, agents and editors answer the question in radically different ways: some say platform is essential to getting published and then selling books; others don't really value platform and reply that writers should spend their time writing.

I've always liked the second answer, partly because I'd rather spend my time writing and partly because I find daunting the prospect of developing an active online presence for myself as a fiction writer. Yet, I've noticed that more and more of these industry professionals are extolling the value of platform, some with great enthusiasm, others only grudgingly. Like it or not, we writers need to be available online for others in the industry and for our readers. The theory is that without the platform there will never be any readers.

If book signings and school visits were once the way many children's authors spread the word about their books, then virtual versions of those events can only spread the word to a wider audience. Moreover, no one's going to invite me for a school visit until my book has been published, but I can blog about my book right now. Maybe a handful of people follow my blog. They like what they read. They tell some friends or ping back. More people read my blog. Suddenly, there is a community following my book before it's even available to read. This is a good thing, I think.

So, I do think writers should spend their time writing, but hanging out online building a platform can't hurt, might help, and, at the very least, is more social than writing, which is so very solitary. Thus, I plan to make this blog more active. As a platform, it's been a piece of particle board that I left out in the yard through a few rain storms, but I'll toss some cinder blocks under it, reinforce the wood, and see what happens.