Finding a Work/Life Balance When Writing—Brandon Sanderson

[Music] i am also a big proponent of a good balance in life um and this can be hard to do as a writer because a lot of you who want to write professionally by necessity have to have another job uh when i uh took this class one of the things that did i took it in the year 2000 way back when uh one of things dave said is there are a lot of people in the writing community that will tell you that you shouldn't have a family for instance because uh it's having a family will distract you from your writing or you will be a bad family member because of your writing and he said this is a fallacy self-fulfilling prophecy people this does happen because they expect it to and because they have bad work habits and i agree with him 100 i think having a good family who is supportive to you in your writing is going to be infinitely more valuable to you than you can even imagine you need to have passion for life to write passionate books and you need to have um a cheering section now there are some issues you want to be aware of when i was newly published i remember an event happened um where that that's always stuck with me um i went out to dinner with some writer friends this would have been brandon mull and shannon hale um and mole and shannon and me and our spouses were there it's actually at mamachu's restaurant if any of you know that in utah valley and we had this wonderful very exciting sort of meeting of minds mull and shannon are two of my favorite people ever they are fantastic writers um i love how people mistake brandon mull and me for each other and occasionally show up in the wrong line uh and we both will naturally sign the others book when that happens um but um just was wonderful and i got to end of this dinner and on the way home i said to my wife wasn't that the most amazing thing ever this is one of my first meetings like this with other authors and she said you didn't look at me one time the entire night i felt like i wasn't there yes um and this was an eye-opener for me because i got married in this community later in life i was 30 um which is like ancient uh in utah county terms uh for our uh our watcher from belgium she might be like you got married that early what's wrong with you um because i've noticed in europe they do tend to have a later marriage age uh around here you know it's uh it tends to be a lot faster um and i was kind of very i was used to writing dominating my life because i did not have really all of this family stuff which is really important and really valuable i just didn't have it i wanted it i didn't get it till later in life and i had to realize that once i had other people in my life that i cared about um to that extent i couldn't let writing dominate that writing is something that can dominate every waking moment of your life if you let it a friend of mine howard taylor uh loves to use the joke he's very good with these that goes uh it's great being self-employed because you only have to work half days and you get to decide which 12 hours that is um it is true this isn't the only job like this there are lots of jobs like this but writing is one of those that if you let it it will consume everything this can be really dangerous uh this can lead to everything being about you and nothing being about your loved ones everything being about the writing um this can be very helpful as well because you can use off moments that other people might waste like on a commute thinking about your stories and working on them can be very handy thing so emily and i had to work out some things mostly issues with me dealing with this and one of them was the realization that when i'm with her i need to actually be with her i can't be on rocha i can't be on schedule i have to make sure that i'm there for my wife during those times and in turn one thing that i would tell you to try to explain to your loved ones is that you need uninterrupted writing time when it's writing time this is not the case for every writer but for most writers i know the you usually have a warm-up period and a cool-down period for your writing session which means that it takes you a little while to get into it then you have a really productive section in the middle and then you get finished with uh whatever scene you're working on and you start to cool down and if you're right you still have writing time you will then kind of spin back up into another section or scene and then spin down again getting interrupted in the middle of this really productive time can be catastrophic for a lot of writers even just a small thing that your spouse might think is not a big distraction at all just saying hey what do you want for dinner can pull you out of that and can interrupt the flow that instead of a 10 second interruption it can turn into another 30 minute interruption as you start spinning down naturally because you've already you've been interrupted and then you have to like try to force yourself to spin back up learning how to spin up and down faster is something you can practice but it's not something every writer can do um so i recommend kind of a trade um a kind of where you go to your loved ones and you learn how to make sure you are there for them during family time and you wall that time off in your brain and you're not allowed to be thinking about your stories during that time and in turn you make your loved ones the guardians of your writing time whatever that is you have in your life where they're gonna make sure that nobody interrupts you during those important moments that you have your two hours uninterrupted so that you aren't getting a phone call in the middle of that or the person coming to want to do pest control or whatever it is um that you have that time what i do in my life is i do two writing sessions i'm very i you need about a two to four hour chunk anything less than that and i generally can't work on new pros for a chapter because that's spin up and spin down i can do other things i can outline i can edit but i can't work on new pros unless i've got at least two hours i like three or four um usually when everything is on things have been a little off for covid but i usually get up at noon or one and write from one until five four hour chunk at five i stop and five until ten is family time for me and that is walled off i don't work on books even in the back of my brain there's got to be you know it's got to be a really steep wall for me to make sure i am there for them and i have to like mentally say you are there for them when your kids ask you to do something that's the time you say yes i'm going to go do that there are things that'll interrupt that this class is one of them but on a normal day that time should be theirs and then i go back to work at 10 after everybody goes to bed theoretically um children are children and i write from 10 until 2 and then 2 until 4 is goof off time for me video game reading a book listening to a podcast whatever it is i feel like doing assuming i have met my word count goals and things like that um this may not work for you but i hope that some of these ideas help you with understanding this um i will reiterate what dave said a family um and time away from your books is actually going to be really important for you not burning out for you having things to write about and for you keeping that good balance in your life much tougher when you can't write full time like me i understand that but just take that to heart and hopefully it'll be useful to you you

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

Views: 29,974

Keywords:

Id: QI-HN_gBomk

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021