Like many other writers, my dream is to be a Writer with a capital ‘W’ – to make a healthy and satisfying income purely from writing and writing-adjacent endeavours. Also like many other writers, this is not yet my reality, and reality currently involves a real job, piles of responsibilities and a good helping of commitments I can never bring myself to shed. I am determined to get that capital ‘W’, though, so finding the space for my creative outputs and ensuring productivity is a must, because ultimately, if I don’t, who is going to write that book I so badly want to finish?

Now, there are lots of ways people approach this problem, and mine is just what works for me. Others handle this through regimented routines, writing retreats or support groups, and that’s what gels with their work style, their family’s needs, their sleep schedule and their personality. You do you, obviously. Me, I’m a hyper-productive, overly-ambitious introvert with no children, multiple demanding but flexible jobs that wax and wane according to the cycles of the school year, and a blog post to write, so I’m going to talk to you about how I create the space for creative productivity (let’s call it writing) in my life.

You must be so organised!

In the past ten years, I’ve finished two degrees, commenced a third one, written a thesis, written and released four novels, edited and published numerous works for other writers, all while either teaching classroom full-time or, in the last two years, lecturing part-time. I also write hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction between books, manage this blog, mark a lot of assignments and consult for an independent school as a board member. I am often asked how I get through everything. “How do you find the time?!” is frequently expressed, as is “I wish I had the time to write a book!” and “You must be so organised to have all that going on!” And honestly, the first thing I feel when someone suggests that, is I feel like a fraud, because if you’ve ever seen my desk, you’d know organised is not a word I connect with. If you saw the inside of my mind, you’d cringe – wonky mismatched filing cabinets spilling old printouts, discoloured folders, polaroid photos, streamers and glitter all over the floor, with handmade cards and scribbled to-do lists sticky-taped to the sides of every cabinet. I know very few creatives who consider themselves organised.

What I am, in fact, is determined.

I rarely feel organised. But organisation looks different in every instance, and it’s still a useful word to describe the approach I’ve taken toward my creative life to get where I am so far on my journey. My creativity is important to me, and finding space for it in my schedule is a priority. But often, as busy people will attest, the time isn’t there in the schedule. What are we supposed to do with that?

Two options, the way I see it: accept it, or make it.

Reasonable flexibility

Accepting that the time simply isn’t in the schedule sounds like giving up, but I don’t see it that way unless you forget to put the compulsory ‘yet’ at the end. At this time of year, setting up a classroom every morning, teaching every day and laminating late into every night, the time to write simply isn’t in my schedule, and even if it was, I don’t really have the inspired brainpower left at the end of each long day to produce anything more substantial than this blog post. My priority is setting strong expectations in my classroom and transitioning the children warmly into their new school year, and given that this early, more-exhausting-than-usual phase of this job is temporary, I consider these days without writing as an acceptable loss. I know that freer weekends and even freer holidays are on the horizon and on those days, I will make up the lost time and word counts. Later in the year, I’ll have weekends packed full of birthday parties, or a fortnight of solid marking, or a big study deadline, and to me, it’s reasonable to let writing take a backseat for a short period, because those are priorities at those times. I’m determined to attain that capital ‘W’, so I know I will shift my priorities back as soon as I can. In that way, I suppose, I am constantly organising and reorganising myself.

An appointment with the muse

The alternative, when the time isn’t there to be found, is to make the time. This is the part with the hard calls and the tough self-talk. “You say you really want to write that book, do you, Shayla? Okay – what do you want it more than? Another episode of Stargate? An evening playing the Sims?” I’m not going to lie, sometimes I do choose Stargate or the Sims, but making time means becoming aware of these subconscious choices. We all have the same twenty-four hours available to us each day that we can distribute between our priorities. We all make reasonable allowances for major commitments – children, sleeping, work, and these differ for everyone – but how we spend the rest of our time is up to us. Twenty minutes browsing Facebook is time not spent writing. A two-hour film is two hours not spent writing. Which would you rather? Because it is a choice. Either choice is fine, but only one gets more words on your page.

Making the time to write in my schedule means treating it like it matters. Is it more important than Instagram? Yes, so in this moment, I’ll choose writing over Instagram. Is it important enough to commit to, like an appointment, or does it get pushed aside whenever something else pops up? I have turned down social invitations in order to spend a day writing where I have set the day aside for that purpose, and I have wonderful friends who understand how much I look forward to my writing appointments the way they look forward to yoga sessions or watching sport. My friends are cool – they’ll still be there tomorrow or next week, and I’ll be able to tell them how much I got written down on my writing day. I create the space in my schedule by prioritising my writing, as appropriate to my personal rules and standards, and by treating my time flexibly.

So not organised…

While I still don’t view myself as an organised person, I do manage myself, my time and my thinking a lot, which could be interpreted as organisation, in order to live a productive and creative life amidst my busy chaos. The determination to succeed at my many endeavours, and especially my capital ‘W’ dream, is best supported by a series of systems (lists, diaries, word count goals, study and writing appointments) and an awareness of my own choices regarding my approach to time. I definitely mismanage my time a lot, and I am far from a perfect role model when it comes to balancing creative career with reality. But this self-aware approach has worked for me – the awareness that I’m in charge of my time and my writing, and that I can make the judgement call as to whether to accept that the time isn’t free yet or to dig in my heels and carve out the time I need. It’s an approach that respects my many other responsibilities and the cyclic nature of my busy working and study life, but does nothing to dampen my determination.

I hope that for some other busy, exhausted, determined writers seeking that capital ‘W’, this post can serve as a friendly reminder that ‘too busy’ does not preclude ‘successful’ and ‘getting that book finished’.

~Shayla Morgansen

Shayla Morgansen is a writer, editor and educator from Brisbane. You can find her YA fantasy series, ‘The Elm Stone Saga’, on our webstore, and you can find her on Facebook, Instagram and her website.

I’ve just gotten back from a magical three weeks in Europe on the cusp of winter, and as soon as I finish this blog post and all my photos finish downloading off my phone, I’m switching off all other applications and opening my book draft. Sorry in advance for the short post.

I want to talk a little about the ways, both positive and negative, that travelling affects and influences my writing practices. While there are uncountable ways in which seeing the world opens my eyes to new experiences, other ways of doing things, exotic places and unexpected points of view for me to explore in my stories, it is also a simple fact that three weeks wandering the world is three weeks not working directly on the book. Some writers can write anywhere. They use beautiful notebooks, curl up in cafes and parks in stunning cities and let their pens flow. As much as I romanticise this idea and collect notebooks for this exact purpose, it doesn’t happen, because in flow-state I write too long, too fast and too intensively for my hand to keep up with my mind. I need a PC. I need a desk and my own space. I need my music and my drafting documents, which are on my PC, which is on my desk, in my own space.

So a holiday from my life is also a holiday from my hobby. I think in a couple of ways this is a good thing. In one respect, I can’t feel guilty about wasting time not working on my book, because I physically can’t work on it. It’s out of my hands. All I can do is be in the moment of where I am, enjoying my holiday all the more, and spend my dull times – in transit or in lines, so many lines… – with my stories in my imagination, where I can’t write through my ideas but have to let them ruminate and reshape. This gives me more time to consider alternatives and how this could impact the storyline and my characters before I get home to write it down.

As mentioned above, a big way in which travelling affects my writing is indirectly through me. Travel changes a person. You see other ways of living, you see poverty, you see extravagant wealth, you see beauty in art and horror in battle-scarred churches. You fall in love with languages you’d not heard before and feel desperately vulnerable in cities where you thought you’d feel safe. You learn about historic poor choices and how these have echoed through time and been commemorated in monuments and rituals. You wonder how the world could ever have let these things happen and realise they’re not so different from what goes on today. Travel shows you patterns of human experience, similarities and difference all at once, and as a result you grow. It comes through in your writing as you mature and increasingly desire to explore these complicated elements of humanity. In my Elm Stone Saga, readers will have noticed the shift of focus from schoolgirl concerns in the first book to more political and ethical matters as the series progresses. This isn’t something I set out to do; just the natural process of a maturing author using my story world as a medium to explore the issues I’m exposed to in my own experience.

Travel also provides new settings. I fell hard for Prague the first time I visited the Czech Republic three years ago, and it found its way into the final scene of Unbidden. Years earlier, the first city I visited outside of Australia and New Zealand was Paris, and though I was sick and jetlagged and sixteen, I was enamoured of the tall narrow apartment we stayed in, with its tiny retrofitted one-person elevator and antique iron staircase railing and the uneven flooring and the narrow, cobbled street it was on. When I started writing Chosen just a couple of months later, it was this picture that came to mind when writing Emmanuelle’s Parisian home. Her scenes were later cut out or trimmed to make way for Aristea and Renatus’s storyline, but it was the place that provided the authentic details to that flash of inspiration.

The human brain is incredible but flawed, and it can’t keep all the data it processes in its repositories. It has to cull, and specifics of place and experience are lost. How the buildings don’t quite line up, all built at different times with no standardisation, and the bicycle chained up out front has a twisted front wheel from being run over and still isn’t claimed after three days. How the rain drips through the hop on/hop off bus’s canvas roof for so long that a wave pool is generated at your feet by the movement of the vehicle and the headphone jack sparks a little so you opt to go without audio guide this time. How the wintry sun reflects off distant snow-capped hills or how the first view of Rome from the Palatine Hill took your breath away.

Because I can’t not write at all, and because I have all those notebooks I can’t write my stories in, I keep a travel journal for all those little details of place and experience. What I saw, heard, smelt, felt; my impressions, my associations, what I expected and what I learned. I keep the habit of diary-writing while I’m away to help organise my thoughts but also to give myself something to read later that isn’t Wikipedia or TripAdvisor. It’s hard to flesh out a place you’ve never visited – a challenge I accidentally gave myself when I first cast all my original Elm Stone settings. In future I want the descriptions to come from my own experience, to mirror what I saw and knew there, and I have several times pulled my journal off the shelf (it lives next to my home copy of Unbidden) to revisit my words from Prague. You can’t get that personal research from staying at home and working on the book, unfortunately, so while three weeks wandering the world is three weeks not working directly on the book, it is certainly not three weeks lost.

~ Shayla

Shayla is the author of the Elm Stone Saga

Visit Shayla’s bio here