Something came to mind yesterday, as I was
wasting time checking and rechecking I had enough beer for the world cup final.
Even though I am now six months, more even, out of formal work (I have my own company of course and fully include
writing as work! but I just mean a traditional 9-5 role) I have kept up, for
the most part, a fairly traditional day routine. I don’t get the train into
town anymore but I’m still up early-ish and stick to a standard working day
structure. I could have fallen into a variety of different routines, most of
which would have been disastrous for any useful productivity…but a lot of fun…but
I haven’t and the thing that struck me was that although my day schedule is the
same, the way I plan my year is entirely different from before.
I spent the last
nine years working in an educational environment, specifically an art and
design university. It meant working to a very structured (no laughing please)
year plan. What’s more I worked in the department that was responsible for
managing the estates use of space and course and resource timetabling (again,
no laughing please).
I’m
not going to go into the role in detail here, that is behind me now and I’ve no
desire to think about it but the reason I tell you is that the nature of my job
instilled in me (or did I already have it which is why I was in that job) a
very disciplined idea of structuring time. I would know dozens of different
term dates, exam dates, building opening times, tutor teaching days, open days,
student exhibition dates (install, opening and takedown), I would know
individual course timetables, workshop and resource opening times, travelling
times between sites, I would know dozens of meeting calendars, project board
meetings, university holiday dates, library opening times, gallery opening
times and exhibition dates, I would know when staff took their holiday, what
resources were used and when by pretty much everyone…the point is, my diary
used to be crammed full of dates that I needed to know in order to plan
properly. Most of those would be one or two years in advance, some three or
four.
As
of today, the only dates I have in my diary are my friends and families birthdays
and alas now the world cup is finished not even the football schedule! My to-do
list never encroaches into the week after the one I’m in.
Okay,
so I can on one hand gloat and say how free I am and how all of that pressure
and complex planning has disappeared from my life but the truth is that I
enjoyed it and what’s more, it was important to my progression.
What
has this got to do with writing I hear your tired brain crying. Well, I didn’t
mention it above but there is another series of events that would be in the
diary and this will be recognized by anyone who has worked in an organization
that has even the most limited of management structures. The annual appraisal.
I’ll
talk another time about how I structure my day now that I am in charge of my
own timetable, for today I’m going to stick to the disappearance in my life of
that yearly milestone where you tell your boss how fantastic you have been and
that you deserve a huge pay rise and a massive expenses account…shortly
followed by walking out the door having accepted a two year pay freeze and
being transferred to head office to squeeze into an overcrowded open plan
office next to the people you have only ever emailed and never met in person
but just know you are going to hate.
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Allow
me one brief moment of gloating…this was my office today
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Whether it is called Year Review, Personal
Appraisal, Development Review, Year End Interview or whatever, there are a
million names for it, it is when you sit down with your manager and discuss how
the year has gone. You may be in an organization that has a fifty page document
full of checklists and ‘Your Comments’ sections and so on, or you may be in a
place that simply goes to the local pub for a sit down chat. You may be in a
place where the appraisal is aligned to your salary, a good year you get a
raise, a bad year and you don’t. You may be in a place that sets you lots of
targets so that you must go on three training courses, two research trips and
collect at least ten chocolate eggs at the company Easter egg hunt in order to
qualify for the recommended for a raise signature.
I
don’t know what you think of them, I’m sure a large proportion hates them and
think they are condescending wastes of time. I’m sure there are those who
really value the opportunity to sit down with your boss and speak openly and
honestly. In my case, I actually didn’t mind them. I saw value in having the
opportunity to speak my mind, ask for things (I was one of those annoying
people who actually wanted to go on
training courses) and discuss the ideas I had for the future.
The point is I
don’t have them anymore. So how do I
gauge my progress now!
- How do I know I am doing good job if I don’t get a pat on the back from a boss? How do I know I am being successful if I don’t get a raise?
- How do I know I am doing the right thing if no one is there to tell me I am?
- How do I know what skills I need to develop?
- How do I know if I am learning all the right things?
- How do I know…well…anything, if I don’t have someone more important than me and who is paid more than me and is older than me telling me what to do?
Well being self employed certainly puts
this into perspective and for the sake of this blog I’m going to call writing
being self employed, let’s just put all the possible ways you work under this
for now.
Also,
sorry to sound so blasé but let’s also forget about the company accounts and
self assessment stuff (I’m kneeling and doffing my cap to the HMRC as I type),
of course that is vitally important but I’ll blog about that another time,
business and financial matters.
What
I am talking about here is suddenly being on your own with no one to direct
you. I have to set my own targets and that is not as easy as it sounds. There
are so many wonderful people that offer free advice on their websites and blogs
about how to ‘be a writer’ and it covers everything you can possibly think of
yet it is still just you, sitting in front of your computer/laptop/pad of
paper/typewriter (I still like to think) that has to push themselves to make
that advice a reality. There are no longer organizational parameters you have
to work to and as liberating as it is, there are reasons why successful
companies have them.
I
have drafted a few versions of a business plan and there is a lot I am looking
forward to achieving yet the core business of writing is much harder to put
into a diary than I ever expected. I know I am sort of on holiday too so that
isn’t the best state of mind to start cracking the whip but I have no doubts at
all that I need to take writing more seriously than I have ever taken anything
in my life. I am going to have to take all of the skills I have developed in my
working life and apply them to create a structured and demanding schedule. I
cannot afford to flit from day to day, week to week and month to month without
any sort of plan or target. That is the easiest way to suddenly say hello to
birthdays I never saw coming. I will turn thirty five years of age this
November, if I am blowing out the candles on my fortieth without any
significant progress made then I will only have myself to blame and it will be
because I never set myself targets and treated writing like a business. It is
no good saying, ‘the novel is coming along’ or ‘I am working on new ideas’…and
so on.
I
need a formal structure and that includes being disciplined with my writing
time. I need to know exact dates when I am filming interviews for my YouTube
channel. I need to know exact dates and times of everything! I am not in an
organization where this is all provided anymore. I can’t rely on anyone else.
There are no markers and milestones other than what I set so I had better
bloody well get on with setting them as otherwise years will disappear and I
will still be talking about how great it is to have freedom and be my own boss
yet never finish a bloody story or earn a bloody penny!
I
have talked enough for now, this was just a general feeling I wanted to share
with you of comprehending the impact of being disjointed from the workplace and
some of the more formal structures that are no longer there for me to use. What
I will do is come back to this subject next year, when I am back in the UK and
working full time on writing (man, that sounds so fantastic on one hand, yet
I’m going to miss this weather and lifestyle! It’s going to be damn tough!) and
share with you my timetable, my week, month and year planner, my objectives, my
aims, my targets and see what you think. After all, I want to be a writer yes,
but I also want my business to succeed, I also want to improve as a businessman
and grow the company so it will be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.
So please stay in touch with me on this one.
Spanish
Update
Learning Spanish is still taking its toll
out on me. It’s a slow process no denying that. I have accepted now it will be
many years before I get to a basic conversational level. Talking in stuttered
three or four word present tense rhetorical questions is one thing. Having a
natter as we say in the UK is another. It’s great though, having such a big
task ahead of you and thinking…one day…
I won’t mention
names for the sake of privacy but I was very kindly invited to a birthday party
this week. I went along only knowing one person and I was seated in between a
dozen people all heartily debating the world cup and so on. That’s when you
realise how far away you are because I struggled to understand a bloomin’ word.
I could get snippets here and there but of course once I had digested a few
words the conversation had moved on and I had not an idea how to connect the
words into sentences and understand the gist of what the overall meaning was.
However, it was a fantastic time, great food and great company and every time
you are in a situation like that I am sure you learn more than you realise at
the time.
I am still in
awe of people who have mastered two or more languages. Just the thought of
trying to write in another language as well as I know English seems impossible
to me right now. Some very famous writers achieved their best work writing in
their second tongue, wow, simply wow.
Writing
Update
I’ve spent a long time, at least two weeks,
working on a short story and it has been a very frustrating process. You see it
started off as a very short piece connected to a real event in my life, the
storm in the UK (and elsewhere) in 1987. However, the reason it has been
frustrating is that the original concept I had has now changed and turned into
something entirely different. This is frustrating not because I don’t like what
has happened, I’m very happy about that, it’s because I haven’t done any
writing!
That’s what
happens sometimes and you can’t get too upset about it. Par for the course as
they say, ideas change and develop, that’s what it is all about however the
pain is that it feels like two weeks wasted because hardly any words have been
put down on paper, when you look back at so much time spent on something yet no
actual physical work to show for it, it can be a bit depressing. Deep down
however you know it’s for the best. It has been a very valuable process and
I’ve learnt a lot from it. Developing an idea can be exhausting and more than a
bit masochistic, constantly beating yourself up over and over to get something
right…and knowing each time that it is still not right! Yes, a bit further in
the right direction but…
It also shows
that you are taking it seriously, because to take that extra time and that
extra care shows you are dedicated. I know I won’t use a fraction of the
research I have undertaken, I won’t use hardly any of the character profiles I
have worked on, I won’t use probably 70% of the work I have done over these
last two weeks, but I’m okay with that. I know that the story will be better
because of it.
The biggest
disappointment is knowing that in your head an idea is getting better and
better and really developing into something you think is great but knowing you’re
not good enough to express the idea. You know you won’t quite do it justice.
Yet again, that is okay, you have to live with that, you have to believe that
one day you will get better and that in the long run these disappointments were
all building towards something. So it does in one sense feel like a total waste
of time because all of that work won’t translate into a product that truly
represents the intention. Yet I have to
do it in order to get better - there is
no shortcut – THAT is why it is a
frustrating process.
There is one further reason why this particular
story has been hard work. It is because it has a real life event in it. It has
been fascinating for me to research into something I barely remember (I was 8
or 9 years old when the storm occurred) but do have concrete specific memories
for certain parts. To talk to people who were there, to read about the
consequences I can only understand now as an adult and so on. I know I keep
saying this but I think this warrants another blog, I’ll talk about this again
soon.
Before I go: Congratulations Germany!
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© Getty Images
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Take care everyone,
***
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