jennie nash

the energy equation

Let's say that you've set aside a half hour a day to work on your book. Maybe that half hour comes at the same time every day, or maybe it comes at different points, depending on your schedule. So you have a good day doing the other things you do in your day, and you sit down and you work on your book and all is well. You feel pretty good about yourself. But then there comes a day when things don't go so well in the rest of your life. You get a cold. Or a migraine. Your dog gets sprayed by a skunk. Your daughter has a meltdown over her math homework. Your car breaks down. Your boss pisses you off. Sound like life? Right. So you sit down after a day like that, and what tends to happen to most people is they stare at the blank page, fuming or sad or depressed from their day, and they try to shake it off to get in the happy writing place, and they don't get there. So think, writing is hard, and, this sucks, and they end up write nothing. It doesn't take too many of these days for your project to go off the rails. You start thinking that there's something wrong with you. That you weren't cut out to be a writer. That your life is just too chaotic right now. And then you give up.

I have a different way of dealing with the realities of life:  match your writing energy to your life energy. When you sit down each day, you use whatever you're feeling to fuel your work. This could be literal. Say, for example, that you're boiling mad at your dad. This is a perfect time to write a scene where someone gets mad at someone else. The energy equation also works, however, in a more organic way.

Let's say that you have a terrible sore throat and stuffy nose. You feel a little blah. Instead of trying to be really creative when you sit down to get some writing done, do something that doesn't take a lot of concentration and energy, instead. Do something a little less taxing, a little more blah. Go research a few historical  facts you need to know in order to move your story forward. Track down the email you need to write a guru in your field so that you have it on a day when you feel motivated to send a note. Maybe you don't write a word during your writing time on these days, but you're moving your project forward and you can feel good about that.

This strategy works particularly well if you have kids in your house. Until my older daughter went off to college, I had two teenage girls at home -- and all their friends coming in and out of the house at various times. I love having kids here, but my office is in the middle of the house and it's very hard to write when the house is full. So instead of throwing up my hands and saying, "I'm not writing for the next five hours," I take on a task where I don't mind getting interrupted by someone asking if I can make cookies. I might, for example, organize my files. Or look through notecards I've made to see if there's anything good on them. Or fiddle with an outline. The last thing I try to do is craft beautiful sentences and dig into my character's true motivation. I'd fail for sure -- both as a writer and as a mother. So I match the energy of my house to my writing energy, and everyone is happy.

The best part about this strategy is that when you have a few minutes when the house is quiet and you're feeling good, you can just take off. You can feel the high energy, and feel your own power, and you just go. These are the days when I feel like I can tackle any problem on the page, and face any setback -- and so I do. I go right to those tough places, and I fly. The main thing is to recognize these days when they come and to seize them.

I use a correlary of this theory of energy conservation when I do a big revision. You can read about that in the truth about revision.