Writers make a living in different ways. I am lucky enough (and struggled hard enough) to have a job that includes writing: an anthropologist who works in academic research. And yet I found myself wanting to write more and differently, to be creative, to produce fiction and creative nonfiction in addition to peer-reviewed manuscripts describing research results or grant proposals to fund further research.

The difficulty for me has been ensuring that I have both time and mental energy left over from the paid work to give to my creative endeavors. I think of it as establishing—and maintaining—a ‘work-write’ balance. Academia can be all-consuming, but whatever the day job, many of us are guilty of overworking. When it comes time to clock off, but the project deadline is at the end of the week, walking away may simply not be a responsible option.

But what if you face a writing deadline as well as a work one, perhaps for a contest entry or a journal’s reading period? Maybe you made a commitment to yourself to finish a first draft of a chapter or a short story by midnight tonight. How, as writers-with-jobs, can we ensure that writing keeps its rightful (or writeful) hold on our time?

I have developed three main strategies.

1) Blend rigidity with flexibility. I keep a schedule, but a malleable one. Writing comes first in the day. Before I check my work email, before I return to whatever it was that felt so pressing yesterday as I left the office, I look at what I was writing, and I add something. It may not be much, but I add something. Those ‘somethings’ pile up, and whatever the day throws at me, I have at least touched my current creative writing project.

2) Have a ‘focused four’. I adapted this strategy from Karma Brown’s book The 4% Solution*. Brown, a novelist, notes that one hour constitutes 4% of a day; by devoting that single hour every day to writing, you can write a book in a year. Brown also advocates choosing four things that you will get done today, and noting them down. My writer-with-a-job version requires that at least one of the four items be writing-related. It might be simple (e.g. post a new blog entry), or more nebulous, such as “decide on point of view for novel.”

3) Bank time at work or at home when possible. I throw more hours into my job or into household tasks when there is a lull in writing. Then if a writing deadline looms or if I have a creative spurt, I know I can ‘borrow’ time back either at work (if the structure permits) or from the domestic front (if that structure permits). Caveat: I try not to get too deeply into ‘debt’ on either side of the balance equation.

Things change over time. The patterns that existed for me ten years ago are no longer relevant, and I have had to find other ways to maintain my work-write balance. My writing output is not vast, but it is consistent. After penning and publishing a number of short stories, I have recently completed a novel, and I am many pages into a creative nonfiction project. My creative itch is getting scratched.

And I still have my job.
*Brown, Karma. The 4% Fix: How One Hour Can Change Your Life. HarperCollins Publishers. 2020.

BIO – Leslie Carlin is an anthropologist as well as a writer of fiction and creative non-fiction. Her work has been published in newspapers and literary journals including the Baltimore Review, Reed Magazine, the Ocotillo Review, and the Toronto Star. Leslie maintains a blog called Travails of a Transatlantic Transplant in which she writes about being an American from California who moved to Canada from England. Learn more about Leslie’s creative writing  at www.LeslieCarlin.com and about her academic work at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leslie-Carlin.