Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Hi, folks!
It’s just another day writing in social distancing land. Today’s episode is on dealing with the negatives for those of us trying to write during this unusual time in our history. Just like last week, there’s a transcript below! Also, don’t forget Writing Without Childcare is now permafree. If you find it helpful, reviews are much appreciated.
Here’s the transcript. Scroll on down if you just want to play the episode.
Please note: This is a machine-generated transcript of a conversational-style podcast. Sentence fragments and run-ons abound. It is not a representative sample of my work as an editor.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Book Echoes, the podcast on making great books while making a creative lives that work for us. I’m your host, author Connie B Dowell. And I am coming to you guys today on our family’s fifth week of social distancing. Now, I am somebody who normally gets a little antsy after one whole day in the house. So you can just imagine what it kind of feels like here on week five. And that is part of what I am going to deal with in today’s episode. So I’ve tried to keep things really bright and cheery. I think we all need bright and cheery nowadays. However, I would do you all a disservice if I didn’t talk about some of the dark sides of writing while social distancing. And this again sets aside a whole lots of much darker sides.
There are a lot of people who are sick, a lot of people worried about relatives people out of work or with reduced income who are lacking a certain amount of security. But, and that’s, that’s more than I can touch on in this episode today, but even if you are safe and your family are safe and you have a certain amount of economic security, the realities of writing while social distancing are, they’re tough. And I think it’s important to talk about the tough parts and how to address them as much as possible, acknowledging that not all things are possible.
So let’s get started with number one. Just the negative emotions that you experience while living in this unusual world that make it really hard to get some writing done. You’re probably going to be feeling a lot of frustration that your, your plans are completely canceled for basically the foreseeable future. We don’t know how long this is going to last. And every time there’s a prediction it gets moved back or forward and it’s really hard to plan things. There’s a lot that people looked forward to doing this spring and summer that they’re just going to have to miss out on. We’re all probably also a bit worried even if we are currently safe. It’s scary checking the news every day and seeing what’s going on out there.
We all also probably miss the outside world. For me a lot, a lot, a lot. I know there were a lot of jokes that kind of went around the internet when all of this began, “Oh, introverts have it made,” but everybody, introverted, extroverted, somewhere in middle needs some outside time. We all crave some amount of social interaction and we’re gonna miss that.
So, ways to deal with these emotions: Number one, take a break, take a break if at all possible. And again, I’m gonna reiterate like I did in last week’s episode, taking a break is not equal to working on your writing. Writing is joyful and wonderful. It certainly is for me, but it is also work. Taking a break means seriously doing absolutely nothing or doing something that has nothing to do with your work of any kind. Even if you’re not getting paid to write, if it’s more than a hobby to you, if it’s an ambition, it is actually work. So take a break, especially if you are starting to feel that frustration rise while you are writing or thinking about writing.
Taking a break will also help a little bit with the worry, especially if you can do a calming activity, listen to some calming music, and try to resist the urge to check the news yet again. It’s really hard to follow, but some good advice that I’ve been given is to check the news no more than twice a day and to check it at times of day when you know, you can kind of emotionally regulate afterwards. So it’s tempting for me to check first thing in the morning and I know I have been guilty of doing that even though it brings worry right into my day right away. But probably the best thing to do is–if you have regularly scheduled break times in your life, which I have been doing and have found really useful–to check the news right before your break so that you can do a calming activity afterwards and get yourself back to normal. Now if you’re taking a break because you are just feeling an immense amount of frustration, an unscheduled break, please do not stop and check the news and stress yourself out again. But if this is a regularly scheduled part of your day, that is probably a good time to do that, to manage the worry that comes from checking the news again and again.
Now, missing the outside world that you know is not going to be helped as much by a break, but there are a few steps you can take to help yourself out. If you have a backyard, you can go and be outdoors for a short amount of time. Depending on where you are and your comfort level, you might go for a short walk, because you can maintain a pretty good amount of distance between people. Now in a crowded and more urban environment, that might be much more difficult. You can also try going for a drive. Just get in your car, perfectly social distanced and drive around and just see the world outside for a bit.
But all of those are activities that can help your connection to the outside world as in the physical spaces. But it’s not helping for the outside world in terms of social interaction. And for that, I really recommend trying to get digital as much as possible. Set up a Zoom call with old friends or writing critique partners. Try to FaceTime with relatives. This is especially fun for young children who might be missing the relatives that they’re not getting to see. Try to reach out digitally as much as possible.
So those are some of the emotional experiences just from living this strange new life that we’re all in. But let’s talk about some of the other practical realities. So let’s talk about standards, especially for those of us who are writing with our children at home or for people who are writing and also have a day job or who are doing all of those things. We’ve got a lot of different standards to meet, especially if, as is the case with us, everybody is at home at once and we’re trying to coordinate schedules for working remotely.
There’s a lot of supposed-to-dos in advice type podcast, like this one has been lately. I’m giving you a whole lot more supposed-to-dos. But I try to always give the caveat of “Take this if it works for you.” And a lot of advice I find either omits that caveat or they don’t really they don’t emphasize it enough so that the advice becomes “Here are the things you have to do to get it right. Here are the things you must do.” And I don’t know about you, but I have found that even before social distancing, that if I added up the list of things I was supposed to do to advance my writing and editing career, the things I was supposed to do as a parent, the things I was supposed to do to stay healthy, the things I was supposed to do to be an engaged citizen, and I wrote them all down… No one could ever possibly do them ever in a thousand lifetimes. So now, now that all of those things have just been multiplied by the new reality that we live in, by the lack of boundary between work and home. Which I already didn’t have that much of. I was really working from home mostly, as it was. But everyone is in this situation, the lack of boundaries, all of these supposed-tos have changed, and we’re still trying to impose old supposed-tos on a reality that doesn’t match that.
So many of us are facing what feels like impossible standards, standards we could never meet. That we could never do what we need to do to compensate for what our children are missing at school while also getting our writing done, while also getting any outside work done, while also trying to share this space that we live in with with children or a spouse, while also respecting the spouse’s time to get their work done. And for them to have some quiet and private time. And all of this can feel totally impossible. And even a lot of the advice I’m giving you today, there’s going to be days maybe ever that it just doesn’t work for you.
And I’m going to say two things. I’m going to say that it’s okay to drop some standards. It’s okay not to do all of the supposed-to-dos, but it’s also okay to be really frustrated at that advice that it’s okay not to do it. Because it’s all well and good to say “You don’t have to do these things” without any outside pressure. And there is a certain amount of outside pressure. There are deadlines that I need to meet. My children do need to be learning some things and having some structure. There will be consequences at the end of this if they just become little wild things. And so my advice to you is to bend your standards as much as you can. Live, reevaluate day by day. Tell yourself that it’s okay if you don’t meet your personal standards, and just try to survive and get through this time. But mostly that it’s okay to be frustrated by that dichotomy. The dichotomy of it’s okay not to do all the things, but also you kind of have to do all the things or at least most of the things. Because if you don’t, there will be consequences.
So let’s talk about the consequences. What happens if you don’t get things done that have hard deadlines or what happens if you make mistakes? And I’m going to address specifically writing here, but this might be applicable to other kinds of work that you do. What happens if you make mistakes along the way? Things that feel kind of like a boneheaded error that you wouldn’t have made before.
Let’s address deadlines first. Because for indie authors, we’ve got a little bit of a break. A lot of us, the primary deadline we are trying to meet is an Amazon preorder deadline. Because if you push back a preorder more than once, or if you cancel a preorder, ordinarily you get punished for that. You’re not allowed to preorders again for an entire year. Now, Amazon has actually relaxed that rule during this particular period. So what would happen is you’d push back your preorder for perhaps the second time or you would cancel your preorder, and you would get that triggered email that you are banned from preorders for a year. Then you can write to Amazon and ask that they reinstate it and they will reinstate your privileges, which is a little bit complicated and it’s probably causing some minor freak outs for authors. But that’s how it’s done.
Now for me that option happened a little bit too late for me to have possibly delayed my preorder that went out the end of March. So I had already had my, my stuff in that I had rushed to finish and worked under really difficult conditions. So, I did not miss my deadline. Hooray. I don’t know if they’re reinstating retroactively anyone who did make miss a deadline, but it’s worth asking. So if that’s an option open to you, that could take some relief.
Now, other kinds of deadlines, as you’re approaching them and you think you’re going to miss them, try and communicate with other people. You know, there’s only so much we can do in the world, but fortunately everyone in the world is kind of going through this together. So a lot of times people are willing to work with different deadlines. A lot of times people are willing to extend time, to understand what’s going on, because they’re all dealing with it too.
Now let’s go to the second part of the consequences. Mistakes. Because that’s what happens sometimes when you don’t miss your deadline. I had some hiccups in my book launch and some things that I did that I’m like, I should have seen that. Why did I do it this way, you know, why did I not see this problem before it happened? But I know the reason that happened, and it happened to because I was working under to say less than ideal conditions is putting it such a gross understatement. I don’t even know where to begin, but it’s because I was extremely stressed and working in this strange new world. But yeah, mistakes were going to happen and I probably should have expected even more than it did. I got lucky. But what I did do was I communicated with my readers, and that is what I would recommend to anybody who’s in dealing with a mistake. Be honest and open and communicate to the people that your mistake might affect. Because like I just said, everybody is dealing with this at the same time. Everyone’s experience is different, but there’s a certain amount of, you know, everybody’s going through the same thing. So most people are pretty understanding.
The second thing you need to do is find a way to forgive yourself for the mistakes that happen, and to put them in perspective. And again, looking back here a few weeks later, even though I felt pretty dumb for some of the mistakes that happened I realized that, you know, it wasn’t that terrible and moved on. I’m a writer, it’s not always going to go wonderfully smoothly, but this is the job I’ve wanted since I was six. I need to pick up and move on from that and just keep on writing.
So I’d love to hear from you guys what kinds of frustrations, emotions, problems are cropping up for you and how are you getting past that. As much as is actually possible to get past that. But I’d also love to hear from you what kinds of things you are doing to relax and take time away from work of any kind. Yes. Including writing. You know, what are you doing to chill out during stressful times? I’d love to hear from you at bookechoes.com/show That’s the show notes for all the episodes. And you can give me some tips, some feedback in the comments, or you could leave a rating or review at the podcast app of your choice. And I’d also love to hear from you at connie@bookechoes.com. You could just send me an email.
Oh, before I go, one last reminder that Writing Without Childcare is now permafree. It is available on Amazon, Apple, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and more so look out for that. And I hope it helps some folks. So until next week, happy writing.