I've been thinking a lot about structure lately. Being one of those people who are not dominant on either side of my brain I both crave the beauty of balance and symmetry and cannot follow a detailed plan for my time to save my life. Visual structure, yes. Lifestyle structure, no. I have no concept of time and am incapable of fooling myself onto believing that following a schedule is important.
Well, unless it is following my autistic son's schedule, then life depends on it! But even that is only important because of the effect that ignoring the schedule has on him and therefore the rest of us. No one cares if I waste hours of my day and I can't seem to care either, even if I have a detailed schedule sitting next to me on my desk. As a matter of fact, I can waste lots of time making schedules and plans. I feel very mature and proud as I gaze upon my list of intentions but ultimately feel irritated as soon as it begins to try to dictate my time.
I like to follow my muse as much as possible when the kids aren't around. So much of my day is spent taking care of them and seeing to their needs and the needs of the house and such that when they are not home I want to do what I want to do. It seems like the structure that I tried, with good intention, to put into my day is demanding that I give up more of my time instead of helping me to manage what I have.
I think that this is the artist in me, the part of me that wants to follow the flow of the universe around me and see what I find. It's easy and fun, relaxing and refreshing. As a matter of fact, I think that spending some of my time this way is very healthy for the mind, body and soul and highly recommend it.
But I have noticed that no steadily published author does what they do without structure. As a matter of fact, they all say that until you find a structure for your day, the way that you pursue your career as a writer and for the writing itself that you will never succeed.
Damn, but I think that they are right.
Case in point, I have a tendency to sit and write whatever is in my head. Most of the time I sit down and wonder what I want to write about at that moment. I have paragraphs and pages from all kinds of stuff on my laptop. Now that's okay, but how many of those have I finished? One. How many times have I approached an editor? Once. An agent? Once. This is not how a career is started. I am just way too scattered.
Luckily I consider two wonderful authors to be mentors to me. They are both extremely generous and have talked with or emailed me and I kind of hang on every word that they say about writing. The coolest thing about this is that they seem to represent the two sides of my brain. The first is Marjorie M. Liu, she is the creative side. She comes up with a situation or a great first sentence and then follows the story from there. Organic, she calls it. This is wonderful because she writes with the same process that I do and is so good at what she does. But she is able to sit and write in the story that she is working on. There is method to the madness in the fact that she does what she needs to do and finishes her stories. This is what I learn from her - to allow myself to write the way that I do but to temper that with just enough structure to be dependable as a writer.
The other author is Lynn Viehl. She is so structured that it's almost a military operation, which is fitting since she used to be in the military. Lynn likes to make a notebook about her characters, their world, pictures and plot. As a matter of fact she has even done posts about how to log what you do in a day, figure out how much time you spend on what and then make a schedule for the day, week, month and year to maximize your writing without taking too much away from the rest of your life. I confess, I didn't even read those posts too closely since being that detailed about that much structure made me bored. That is probably a large part of my issue with structure, I don't like to be bored. Structure is sooo boring! But Lynn is a prime example of why structure can work, she has a full and seemingly happy family as well as work life - a goal that we all strive for.
So I've been thinking about what structure can do for me if I find a way to make it workable. A way to combine Marjorie and Lynn's philosophies, as it were. For me, it seems to boil down to daily and monthly goals. One or two of each only - let's not go crazy! I want to blog daily and write for 2 hours on non-work days. There, daily goals that are accomplishable. Monthly goals will be set monthly depending on my status and involve the business side. Since there are only two weeks left in the month and it's the holidays, I've set my goal for the end of January. Right now it is to finish revising my book and send it to the Knight Agency. That means I need to do a whole new synopsis and query, so the monthly goal does have some writing to it but will involve submissions and followups.
There! I feel more organized and structured already. Success is mine. For today.
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