Balance

Every writer, indeed every person, must have balance in their life. Too much of even such a good thing as writing can turn us away from the very thing we desire most.

Writing takes a lot out of a person. It takes soul and it's for that reason that the process of developing an idea, writing, editing and submission is so hard. It takes dedication and it takes passion. Throughout the process writers are constantly demanded to believe in themselves, to believe in their work and to sacrifice both to give something to their readers, or potential readers. This is hard enough without a day job, spouse, children and chores. Every writer has at least one of these things to juggle with their writing and more often than not all of them and more. To stay sane we as writers need to learn a bit of balance.

Kiwi Writers is all about challenges and I know that I have learnt the most and accomplished the most in a short space of time because of challenges with Kiwi Writers and others like National Novel Writing Month. I think you get a taste for challenges and for the high of winning, of making so much progress and being involved in the community of writing that your expectations get raised. You begin to think that you can do that all the time and if only you could you'd have that book written, edited and submitted before you know it. This can be a recipe for disaster.

There are writers who regularly produce thousands of words every day and can even rack up one million words in a year. It is possible and if that's your goal then you can work towards it but you shouldn't expect to be able to do that on day one. Part of learning as a writer is learning how you write the most effectively. Challenges help you push yourself to the limit of that possibility but to do so other things suffer. These things are called life and it is also these things that fuel our writing so we can't ever ignore them and they can't only be sacrificed for so long in the name of writing.

The trick of it all is to know your breaking point. You have to know how far you can push yourself and how long you need to recover when you do so. You need to know the symptoms you have when you're just not going to be effective. You also need to know when you're just making excuses. The only way to do this is practice but you can set yourself up to have effective writing sessions by adapting your environment and using other tricks to get yourself into the writing mode.

The biggest thing that I think writers need to learn to achieve balance is to give themselves permission to have a break. You can be having a break from writing but be riddled with guilt. This is not going to give you the balance but be just as bad as if you were sitting at the keyboard with a blank page staring at you. You have to learn to let go of the words you might have written, the scenes you might have edited or the characters you might have developed. If you do you'll find yourself more determined at your next writing session which will translate into you being more productive and enjoying it just that much more.

And as Mur Lafftery says... when I say you, I mean me. And that's what I mean too. :)

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Balance

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