I started my “Be Your Own Manager” blog series at the end of February, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. Through that series, I’m trying to describe a change in thinking that has been essential for me over the past couple of years.
And it turns out that it’s a good thing I had it fresh in my mind. Because what I hadn’t yet noticed when I posted that first post in the series, was that my work habits needed a bit of “management.” I’d been getting pretty bogged down and frustrated with my fiction-writing projects, and that was spilling over into any kind of writing. I hated it. I didn’t want to do it. And I was sure I’d never be any good at it.
It wasn’t until I started outlining some of the future posts in that self-management series that I realized it was time to do another check-in with myself. Laura-the-manager asked Laura-the-writer why she was dissatisfied and unhappy with writing. And the answer came pretty quickly: I’ve been doing a lot of revising, getting a lot of feedback, and trying to refine my skills in very specific task-based ways. Those are all good and beneficial things, but it had been an awfully long time since I’d focused on the joy of “what if” storytelling.
So, March has been an experiment. After a couple of years of setting each month’s priorities by project (“create a revision plan based on reader feedback” or “revise this short story for submission to the anthology”), I’ve been thinking about my writing in terms of the type of work I’m doing, and I put “generating new words” on the top of the list. I also created a way to stay in touch with those projects that still need to be revised and worked on in a more strategic fashion. But EVERY writing session starts with new words on a blank piece of paper and an invitation to play “what if” was if I was in third grade again. Turns out, that’s exactly what I needed.
It’s been great. I’m having fun again, which was the most important thing. But I’ve also had good breakthroughs on a couple of different projects. It’s amazing how much restructuring my approach to my time helped get me unstuck.
I won’t stick with this strategy long. There are times when a project needs to be the only thing on my plate, no matter what kind of work is required, and I think I’m about to reach one of those times, again. But it was a very successful experiment. As I start to think ahead to April, I’m feeling more excited about setting new goals than I have in months.