Treat Writing Like an Ordinary Workday

For most working people, the number one barrier to putting out quality writing, is a lack of time. No matter who you are. Hours spent tapping away in front of a screen is a pre-requisite to getting good at this thing. I’m open to listen if you reckon you can bring me some day one prodigy, but I’m yet to see it.

And not every hour is built equally. Sure, squeezing in a cheeky half hour after work, or during those precious moments when the kids are asleep, is better than nothing. But compared to one of those rare moments where you’re well rested, are blessed with complete silence and the perfect dose of caffeine? Not even close.

Which is a long way of leading into the point of this essay. As promised, I’m using these off weeks to compare my expectations pre-moving to London, with the reality.

Expectation number one: Having endless time to devote to writing. Treating my time like a workday and cranking out thousands of words a day.

Honestly, this is probably the thing I was most looking forward to when I put together this plan. No more shoehorned in hours before work—which always got stolen away by my phone alarm just as I was getting into the flow. No more fragmented train of thought as work obligations took precedence over a plotline I’d been working on.

 In my head, I was in for something like the perfect scenario I described above (Not entirely without evidence either). During my days in Auckland, I’d quite often head into the office early morning on a weekend, coffee in hand and be able to crank out a good four or five hours of uninterrupted writing.

I know that doesn’t sound like fun to most people. But to me, it’s honestly like a drug. Remember that dog, bringing in sheep from my earlier article? That’s me on certain days. By virtue of all the weird idiosyncrasies that drive me—and a pretty active imagination—there aren’t many things in life that compare to sitting alone and basically hallucinating for hours on end in front of a laptop. Except it’s not hallucinating, because there’s an active element to it. It’s problem solving, grappling with variables thrown out by own brain, which means they’re tailored to me in a weird way. It’s also a painful experience at times. Some days I’ve bitten off too ambitious a premise, or I’ve waded into a structural choice that is beyond my technical abilities. Which, I think makes the instances where it flows easily, that much more satisfying.

I’m not a dancer—or even close to one—but when I hear people talking about dancing, I recognize certain parallels to what I’m trying to articulate here. Freeform, improvisation, that’s governed by certain boundaries. No wrong way of doing things strictly, but, there’s definitely potential to “do it wrong.”

So, that was what I thought I had ahead of me. Days on end of deep work. Imagine the productivity? Shit, I might crank out more than one novel in a twelve-month period!

This was my office desk back in Auckland. Not the terrible set up you might have been imagining.

The reality:  

Not as far off the mark as you might assume. I’ve maintained the early morning habit. Yes, I do regularly have to reign in my caffeine habit in a very addict-like way, but I actually don’t have any issue with a six am start. It’s the later part of the day where I have problems…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s take the timeline back to July 2022.

My first, mistake: Expecting I could juggle my “writing workday” ambitions with three months of travel around Europe.

Funnily enough, the early morning flights, buses, trains, booked walking tours and backpacker checkouts didn’t lend themselves to the most productive writing sessions.

I got it in where I could—a few mornings spent on Italian balconies, or typing away next to a passed out bartender in the lobby of an Amsterdam backpackers—but this was falling well short of what my expectations had set me up for, and it began to seep into the joy of travel.

It took some pretty stern words from my partner Mollie, one day into out trip to Rome when she asked me a question, only to find I was miles away—being tormented by the latest plot problem—before we came to the joint conclusion that I needed to cut my losses at a set timeline—usually about an hour and a half—then stop thinking about writing for the rest of the day.

Idiosyncrasies…

This was a Godsend. Not only did it free me up to enjoy the rest of the day. But it left my subconscious free to work away at those problems without the interference of my exhausted, frustrated conscious mind. Quite often, when I sat down for my next writing session, the solution to whatever problem had been plaguing me, would be there waiting. This is a skill that I still apply today, but we’ll get to that later.

“Tourist.” This is from Poland—I guess they’re not huge fans of Putin in those parts ay?

When we arrived in London, after we’d made it past quite a drawn-out process of finding somewhere to live--property managers over here are dead eyed sharks—the conditions were set for that “writing workday” I’d had my eyes on for so long.

Once again, my days started out just as I envisioned. Get up early, read a few pages of whatever writing theory book I’m on at the moment, consume caffeine then write for as many hours I can maintain focus.

The problems started at about 1:00 pm every day. After a good five to six hours of solid concentration. My brain would feel absolutely fried. It honestly felt like all the happiness juices had been squeezed out my head. The world looked grey. I’d feel I was incapable of even being entertained.

Of course, I didn’t let myself be entertained. I was living off my own savings, and I was painfully conscious of the window of opportunity I had carved out here. This was my “writing workday” after all and I was damned determined to squeeze the most out of it.   

I lasted about two weeks dragging myself along like this. But, eventually, I realised that all the tinkering I was doing in my afternoon sessions were just undoing all the good work I’d achieved in the morning and turning it into some logic-logged shit. It was making my writing worse.

I’ve since read up quite a bit on the motivation systems of the brain and have concluded that what I was doing to myself is something called “dopamine stacking.” By loading up on caffeine, stimulating mental activity, music and the reward of solving a hard problem, I was sending myself into steep peak from my baseline dopamine levels, which is usually followed by an equally steep trough.

Through a meditation-like practice called “non-sleep-deep-rest” I’ve learned how to restore these dopamine levels (which naturally build back up with time) faster, so I very rarely find myself in that “fried brain” state these days, but I still don’t attempt the eight hour workday.

As I learned—or should have learned—in Europe, writing isn’t like a standard job. It requires a very specific combo of concentration, imagination and logic which can’t be maintained for long periods without some trade-off. Attempting to do this also doesn’t fruit the best results. As I did in Rome, I started forcing myself to push all thoughts of the novel out of my head, and saw huge improvements to both the work and my quality of life.

I still made sure to focus some practice that would push my writing forward though. Either by reading writing theory books, substack articles or carrying out writing exercises—which is where most of the short stories on this page were originally conceived—I’ve found a way to keep myself (at least feeling like I’m) moving forward without burning myself out.

There you have it. Reading back over this, it all seems really fucking obvious, but I guess I’m a bit stubborn. In my next article I’ll go into my second expectation: Finishing the novel. Note: I’d already finished a first draft before I moved over. Seems like a sure thing right?