Catherine Egan's Blog - Posts Tagged "rewrites"
On workcycles and Cafe Magic
Dear Blog,
At the SCBWI conference in Springfield (that’s “Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators” – catchy, no?) I went to a seminar on Time Management, presented by an author who shares a last name with (but is no relation to) my favorite ex-boyfriend. (That’ll send all the exes to google. Or not.)
She had managed to write through the caring-for-small-children years, through the full-time Real Job years, and now, while caring for a seriously ill parent. I went in ready for her to change my life, hoping beyond hope that she would tell me how to do this. One of the first things she said was, “For years and years I was sure that there was a schedule out there, if I could only find it, that would actually create space for everything I needed to accomplish. But that schedule did not and does not exist.”
I wanted to throw a full-blown toddleresque tantrum, right there in the front row with my pen and notepad at-the-ready. I didn’t, of course, and being a parent I have learned a lot of techniques for channeling aggression without actually screaming or striking anybody, so I wrote down exactly what she had said and then bit my pen very hard to punish it.
Then she talked about the pomodoro technique, which involves breaking your worktime into 25-minute intervals separated by short breaks. She recommended instead a 45-minute work-cycle, and then a 15 minute break. This idea of breaking your time up into short workcycles has a few obvious benefits.
First, it helps you to get started. Instead of thinking, OK I have two hours, I’ll just check my e-mail, oh and maybe facebook, and then giving up altogether an hour later because your time is really almost gone anyway and what’s the point now, you can say to yourself: here we go, one 45 minute cycle and then I will check my e-mail / do the dishes / dance to Murder Rubicon in my bedroom. Or, if you have two hours and waste the first hour, instead of giving up altogether you can tell yourself, oh well, I have one workcycle left, here goes! And then use it.
Second, it keeps you fresh, I guess. Apparently STUDIES SHOW that we can concentrate well on a task for about 45 minutes and then our concentration starts to wane. But if we take a short break and go back to it, we trick our brains into going back to the beginning and concentrating well again. So we are maximizing our attention to the task at hand by breaking up the time.
Third (and most usefully, for me at least,) if you break your time up in this way, you might look at your day and realize you have more time than you thought. Maybe you don’t have two hours, or even a full hour straight. But you may have two different 45-minute periods in which to work.
So, great. I was annoyed that NO SCHEDULE was going to work, and I did spend a good portion of the seminar making schedules that didn’t work, but I still thought this 45-minute workcycle idea might be useful to me.
Now, my weekday writing happens after lunch. LittleK recently stopped napping, a great blow to my writing time, but I figured maybe he could just stick to LittleJ’s routine of Quiet Time and a movie, and that’s more or less what we’ve been trying to do. However the idea of breaking that two hours into 45 minute segments is fairly ridiculous, because it is broken up all the time, far more frequently and arbitrarily, when I have to break up a screaming squabble, stop the boys from climbing out the window or putting all their dad’s shoes in the oven, make snacks, tidy up the snacks that just got spilled all over the sofa, get drinks, mop up the drinks that just got dumped on the floor, get popcorn for the neenerdeath spinning around on the ceiling fan, etcetera. Getting fifteen uninterrupted minutes is pretty great. I’ve learned to write (sort of) in very short bursts, and to concentrate (sort of) unless the screaming is Really Loud or the silence Really Ominous. But it’s not good writing time. How can it be?
The End Of Naps led to awful frustration on my part, and so That Guy and I agreed that I will leave the house as early as I can on weekends and write all morning in a café. Hooray! We implemented this plan for the first time on Saturday. I put my computer in a backpack and went striding happily through the warm, pollen-filled morning to the nearest café that allows you to sit with a computer – about a ten-minute walk. I got a latte and a seat by the window, since it was still early and the café was nearly empty. I opened my computer and looked at the clock. 8:30. OK – so I would write until 9:15 and then I would take a 10-15 minute break and read poetry, which would inspire me to write better when I came back to my story refreshed. I was starting a Massive Rewrite at chapter 1 and was very excited.
I didn’t stop at 9:15. I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t stop at all until I shut the computer at noon. The café was packed now and people were waiting for tables, so I vacated mine and went swinging home happily. The time may come with this rewrite when the workcycle technique will be useful to me, but for now, I don’t need no stinkin’ breaks. I just need a little time.
Yours, rocking-the-rewrite-so-far,
Catherine
At the SCBWI conference in Springfield (that’s “Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators” – catchy, no?) I went to a seminar on Time Management, presented by an author who shares a last name with (but is no relation to) my favorite ex-boyfriend. (That’ll send all the exes to google. Or not.)
She had managed to write through the caring-for-small-children years, through the full-time Real Job years, and now, while caring for a seriously ill parent. I went in ready for her to change my life, hoping beyond hope that she would tell me how to do this. One of the first things she said was, “For years and years I was sure that there was a schedule out there, if I could only find it, that would actually create space for everything I needed to accomplish. But that schedule did not and does not exist.”
I wanted to throw a full-blown toddleresque tantrum, right there in the front row with my pen and notepad at-the-ready. I didn’t, of course, and being a parent I have learned a lot of techniques for channeling aggression without actually screaming or striking anybody, so I wrote down exactly what she had said and then bit my pen very hard to punish it.
Then she talked about the pomodoro technique, which involves breaking your worktime into 25-minute intervals separated by short breaks. She recommended instead a 45-minute work-cycle, and then a 15 minute break. This idea of breaking your time up into short workcycles has a few obvious benefits.
First, it helps you to get started. Instead of thinking, OK I have two hours, I’ll just check my e-mail, oh and maybe facebook, and then giving up altogether an hour later because your time is really almost gone anyway and what’s the point now, you can say to yourself: here we go, one 45 minute cycle and then I will check my e-mail / do the dishes / dance to Murder Rubicon in my bedroom. Or, if you have two hours and waste the first hour, instead of giving up altogether you can tell yourself, oh well, I have one workcycle left, here goes! And then use it.
Second, it keeps you fresh, I guess. Apparently STUDIES SHOW that we can concentrate well on a task for about 45 minutes and then our concentration starts to wane. But if we take a short break and go back to it, we trick our brains into going back to the beginning and concentrating well again. So we are maximizing our attention to the task at hand by breaking up the time.
Third (and most usefully, for me at least,) if you break your time up in this way, you might look at your day and realize you have more time than you thought. Maybe you don’t have two hours, or even a full hour straight. But you may have two different 45-minute periods in which to work.
So, great. I was annoyed that NO SCHEDULE was going to work, and I did spend a good portion of the seminar making schedules that didn’t work, but I still thought this 45-minute workcycle idea might be useful to me.
Now, my weekday writing happens after lunch. LittleK recently stopped napping, a great blow to my writing time, but I figured maybe he could just stick to LittleJ’s routine of Quiet Time and a movie, and that’s more or less what we’ve been trying to do. However the idea of breaking that two hours into 45 minute segments is fairly ridiculous, because it is broken up all the time, far more frequently and arbitrarily, when I have to break up a screaming squabble, stop the boys from climbing out the window or putting all their dad’s shoes in the oven, make snacks, tidy up the snacks that just got spilled all over the sofa, get drinks, mop up the drinks that just got dumped on the floor, get popcorn for the neenerdeath spinning around on the ceiling fan, etcetera. Getting fifteen uninterrupted minutes is pretty great. I’ve learned to write (sort of) in very short bursts, and to concentrate (sort of) unless the screaming is Really Loud or the silence Really Ominous. But it’s not good writing time. How can it be?
The End Of Naps led to awful frustration on my part, and so That Guy and I agreed that I will leave the house as early as I can on weekends and write all morning in a café. Hooray! We implemented this plan for the first time on Saturday. I put my computer in a backpack and went striding happily through the warm, pollen-filled morning to the nearest café that allows you to sit with a computer – about a ten-minute walk. I got a latte and a seat by the window, since it was still early and the café was nearly empty. I opened my computer and looked at the clock. 8:30. OK – so I would write until 9:15 and then I would take a 10-15 minute break and read poetry, which would inspire me to write better when I came back to my story refreshed. I was starting a Massive Rewrite at chapter 1 and was very excited.
I didn’t stop at 9:15. I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t stop at all until I shut the computer at noon. The café was packed now and people were waiting for tables, so I vacated mine and went swinging home happily. The time may come with this rewrite when the workcycle technique will be useful to me, but for now, I don’t need no stinkin’ breaks. I just need a little time.
Yours, rocking-the-rewrite-so-far,
Catherine
