Filling Your Writing Life
By Kathryn Craft | August 11, 2022 |
photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could pick up a manual on “Best Writing Practices” and follow its advice all the way to publishing success? Reality is, though, we writers are each wonderfully and necessarily unique, and how we spend our days will reflect that. Because new opportunities and changing priorities have caused me to revisit the components of my diminished writing life, a recent episode of THE HAPPINESS LAB, a podcast hosted by Dr. Laurie Santos, clarified my issues by offering up a commonsense image of how to envision time in my overfull life. I share it here in case it might help you, too.
A professor placed a big, clear jar on his desk and then filled it with golf balls. When he asked if the jar was full, the students nodded. Then he poured pebbles into the jar, which filtered in between the balls. When he asked if the jar was now full, the students nodded with knowing smiles. Then he poured sand into the jar, which filled in even smaller gaps. When he asked if the jar was now full, the students said yes.
He said, “This jar is your life. The golf balls are the things that really matter to you. The sand is all the thoughtless ways we spend our time. If we put that in first, the important things won’t fit.”
This image wasn’t new to me, as Stephen Covey used a similar rocks-gravel-sand anecdote in his 1994 release, First Things First. With so many of our lives upended during Covid—I’m imagining rocks and golf balls spilled all over the place—it’s now a great time to reassess what we put back into our jars. Ideally, you will fill them with activities that will enrich your writing life and therefore increase your sense of fulfillment.
If you could spend your day exactly how you wanted, what would you do to be happier?
The podcast guest who shared the golf ball story, social psychologist Cassie Holmes of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and author of the forthcoming Happier Hour, had something to say that will be relevant to the writer who has fantasized about clearing eight hours day to finally nail their novel: psychologically, that might not be the best solution.
For an optimal sense of fulfillment, Holmes’ research suggests we seek a sweet spot of 2-5 discretionary hours per day to invest in activities that will make our lives feel fulfilling. So while there is such a thing as having too little discretionary time, there is also such a thing as having too much: on the regular, her data shows that having more than 5 hours per day of discretionary time results in a decreased sense of life satisfaction.
If you were to dump the contents of your jar, which activities would you add back in to foster the most fulfilling creative life?
Our answers will have much in common, since writers have little discretionary time. Writing itself requires a handful of golf balls right off the bat. Publication adds more. Many golf balls may well be devoted to the reliable paycheck that supports our writing habit. We must continue our education, be that reading novels or craft books, researching, or giving/receiving critique.
What many of us may be missing in our jars altogether, though, is enough time to observe and process the life around us—what our teachers and parents might have pejoratively called daydreaming, yet which is an important component of the writing life. Imagine even a half a golf ball for that!
The stories of the great writers of the past—Hemingway, Faulkner, and Vonnegut among them—always sounded so romantic to me because these men wrote in the morning and then walked in the afternoon to allow their ideas further time to cure.
That’s what I’m missing. The cure. Allowing for it and planning to include time for it is, in this era, a mad skill.
Three years ago, while tracking the hours I spent on various endeavors with the goal of freeing up more time to write, I learned that under the guise of promotion, I was spending way too many discretionary hours on social media. I’d gained some visibility as an author, sure, yet gained no visible boost in sales.
Pulling back, I realized that chatting about myself to an invisible audience had long ago lost its allure. My feed was like endless snacking when what I needed was more nourishing meals. It brought distraction, but never happiness. (Hmm, was I just talking about social media in the past tense? Yes, lately, I’ve even toyed with closing all my social media accounts, but that might take bravery I don’t quite yet possess.)
What could make me happier?
Well, I’m not quite done relating that jar demonstration. When we left off, the jar now had the golf balls, the pebbles, and the sand, and the students thought the jar was full. Then, the professor poured in—and the jar accepted—the contents of two bottles of Corona.
So what was the beer about, his students asked.
His answer: “No matter how full your jar is, you always have time for a beer with a friend.”
Whether over coffee, lunch, or a beer, significant interactions with other people always make me happy. When I had to move my Your Novel Year program online, I sorely missed hosting its writers in my living room.
Lack of interpersonal interaction is without question one of our great Covid losses, but even before 2020, I’d often forsaken time with family and friends to chase my writing dreams, thinking that this is simply the tunnel vision/laser focus/sacrifice that the writing life demands.
But what if my writing might actually be better for the interactions I was denying myself? While investing time in my characters, with the hope that further publication would help me leave a legacy, what if I was failing to invest in the real-life relationships that would be guaranteed to keep my memory alive?
These are the golf balls I want to place in my jar: writing, client editing, reading, teaching, daily exercise, and continuing to learn French. All of these things bring me joy. Daydreaming and new experiences in new places will be the pebbles that will fit in around everything else. If I stay on social media, it will be the sand lightly sprinkled in last. And then, I’m going to pour in a healthy dose of meeting up with the family who loves me, the friends who appreciate me, and interesting strangers who will inspire new thoughts.
My final step will be to put a lid on my jar and protect its contents. Its volume is limited, after all, and the life I’ve built to support my writing is diminished when I allow random golf balls to displace my writing time. Instead of sharing moments of joy, beauty, and sorrow on social media, I long to hoard my life experiences and let them cure without the overwhelming influx of everyone else’s ideas to dilute them. I sense that from this, my best writing ideas will grow.
One thing’s for sure: if it’s possible to create my ideal writing life, I’m the only one who can make it happen. Having written or not, in the end, how I’ve chosen to invest my hours each day will add up to the life I’ve lived.
Please share: Which golf balls do you add to your jar that meaningfully impact your writing life? Is social media in your jar, and if so, is it golf ball, pebble, sand, or a beer with friends? And speaking of beer with friends, I hope to “meet up with you” at the Writer Unboxed OnConference! Meeting up with others in the Writer Unboxed community always enriches my life.
Kathryn Craft (she/her) is the author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. Her forthcoming book, Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward, draws from decades of experience as both a story consultant and a movement specialist/dance critic. Learn more on Kathryn’s website.
[coffee]
I enjoy social media interactions, but they are pebbles of sand. I need to stick them in a baby food jar so there will be room for my golf balls!
Ha! Love the idea of the baby food jar, Priscilla! I’ll remember that one.
Love this, Kathryn. I’m a Covey fan and I’ve heard of this, but you’ve made me realize how important it is to RATTLE THE JAR YOURSELF every once in a while (rather than wait for life to throw jar-tipping chaos at you) and then put things back in the order of your own choosing. The problem is that we love our sand, don’t we? It’s so soft and nice, squishy between the toes, fun to play in. Addictive, even. But if all of Earth were made of sand, there would be no planet. We need our rocks for structure and stability. I think we take them for granted.
Wishing you all the best as you upend your jar, and make space for the things that mean the most to you.
Like where you went with the extended sand metaphor, Therese! And it is a good idea to unpack and re-pack your jar to stay aligned with ever-changing goals and priorities. My short-term goal was to make enough money to attend my son’s wedding in France, so I reallocated my writing hours to more editing. Now I need to figure out how to reverse that process.
And if I might torture the metaphor a bit more? Eventually, all rocks become sand. So honor your rocks while you can. <3
Ooh! Your creative brain is firing on all cylinders today! Go write!
I just happened to be surfing my favorite blogs as I haven’t looked at them in a long time due to a few chaotic months. Kathryn, your post really hit home for me. Several events this year have changed my outlook on life and my writing. I’m in the middle of making big changes. I’m yearning to get off the hamster wheel I’ve been on and get back to writing what I love. Slow writing is what I want. Taking time to write and live in my book. Your post was a great lesson on what to consider when creating your ideal writing life and why it’s so vital.
Glad to hear WU is a favorite blog, Christina, and especially happy to hear that this one arrived at a time when it really hit home for you. I love my periodic, full-immersion writing retreats, but in general, I too prefer slower, more reflective writing. I wish you all the best in your efforts to reprioritize.
Hello, Kathryn. I hate golf, so I’m thinking of your post in terms of plastic easter eggs. The Victorian novelist and everything-else writer Anthony Trollope had a system based on fifteen-minute increments. He rose early, put his watch on the desk, and challenged himself to produce 250 words every quarter hour for two-three hours. He produced sixty books this way, and my understanding is that the carrot at the end of the stick was fox-hunting. That was his reward every morning after he’d filled his quota. In fact, that’s why he wrote: to finance his first love, riding to hounds.
Outside the horsey set, I don’t see his system working for many writers, but it worked for him. Had it existed, would social media have messed him up? I don’t think so. Those riding to hounds with him served the purpose.
About Faulkner, Hemingway, et al: these writers broke from their labors by socializing with people who had little or nothing to do with writing. The writers wanted time in the other real world, not more “craft talk.” That’s how they “observed and processed the life around them.” Hemingway went fishing or shot something, and Faulkner, like Trollope, enjoyed fox-hunting. But I don’t think Faulkner put his watch on the desk.
Thank you. In the age of the internet, everyone should read what you say about distraction, and reflect on it.
Hi Barry, thanks for these stories! Interesting about Trollope, as before I started writing fiction, I started a desktop publishing company, thinking that owning a business would allow me to “ride to the hounds” twice per week. I soon learned that owning one’s own business does not mean one commands one’s own time (or maybe I’ve always needed these visual reminders of prioritizing my life because I’m so bad at it?). My husband has trouble concentrating, so he sets an alarm for twenty-minute intervals to stay on task with whatever he’s doing. Writing fully engages me, though—as long as I’ve devoted some “Easter eggs” to it, I’m in it for the long haul and must be dragged away kicking and screaming.
The Happiness Lab! I love that podcast!
What would I add to walks, observing, beer with friends to feel fulfilled? Reading books that I don’t absolutely have to read for research. Every one of those is a trip abroad at a fraction of the expense. Don’t even have to learn French, though I admire you for that.
But you are making me wonder…should I try writing something I don’t need to write? Discovery is a golf ball that needs space in the jar, for sure. Good post!
A book is a “trip abroad at a fraction of the expense”—love that, Benjamin! And love your idea about “unnecessary writing” deserving a ball in he jar.
I have never aspired to go to France. In fact, I took 7 years of Russian in high school and college and I never aspired to go there either. (it was the USSR days, but things haven’t changed all that much as far as I can tell). I’m learning French because I now have a French daughter-in-law, and being able to meet her parents halfway, linguistically, during our recent trip there for the wedding celebration was so much fun. It made me realize I’ve always been interested in the way people communicate, as I even learned sign language, which I would use with my friend to tell secrets to my friend on the school bus. Was studying French every day for the last 600 strictly necessary, though? No. Just following my gut with this one because it’s fun, and because it’s taught me a lot about English as well.
First Dan, then Sarah, and now you, friend. All reinforcing for me the beauty and necessity of stepping back, taking time, doing things the way that feels right and breathes life into oneself. Because. “in the end, how I’ve chosen to invest my hours each day will add up to the life I’ve lived.” I too love the notion of writing in the morning, thinking in the afternoons, and living at night. Ah, what a life that would be!
I have jars of rocks all over my house, so I know well the intricacies of filling them. And this seems to be the right time to empty out my life jar and really give thought to what gets put back in. One should never ignore repeated nudges and hints from the Almighty. Thanks for being another nudge.
Erin, thank you for your kind indulgence. It took me some time to figure out what I wanted to say in this post, after hearing that podcast, so I stuck with my own experience—and then doubted its usefulness, because as you said, so many have written posts like this since Covid began. But I love “repeated nudges”—because that’s what it takes sometimes, right?
Back in my college dancing days, even though I had an amazing mentor, I was always a fan of taking master classes. A different teacher might explain the same old tired concept a new way (or in the case of large objects in the jar, the same way but at a new point of need) and voila!—I’d have the break-through moment I hadn’t known how to ask for. That’s how I felt when I heard the podcast, and I’m happy to know it impacted you in a similar way. And how interesting that you have jars full of rocks! Maybe they have been waiting to be filled up with more of your beautiful stories.
Thank you for this post. I like to find out that my day is structured similarly to other writers.
Hi Dawn, thanks for stopping by! It is affirming, isn’t it? Maybe these reliable golf balls are the Best Practices we seek.
Kathryn, I laughed out loud at the beer pouring—cheers to communing with friends. I took Laurie Santos’s Yale Science of Well-Being course a while back and it was well-worth the time, though I still dip into darkness too much.
I struggle with trying to free myself from the desiring of big results in my writing work (i.e., sales/recognition) and the satisfactions of the writing itself, which are real. (When I’m not cursing about them.) Those desires are sand. But I’m pleased to continue collecting other golf balls, such as learning about birds, trying to learn Spanish, travel to intriguing places (Malta, most recent), and resisting, in my modest way, the odious efforts to overturn our democracy. Oh, and cocktails.
Thanks for filling up my morning jar with the good stuff.
“The Science of Well-Being”—that sounds like an amazing course!
On good days, Tom, I believe we need to have pie-in-the-sky dreams, because it’s just too hard to justify the investments (years of time, emotional toil, critical pummeling, you name it) unless you believe it may provide just reward. It’s certainly easier to justify to your spouse, lol. The intrinsic reward is the life raft we must always remind ourselves is always available, even while our ego is saying, “Well maybe next time…” Life is always better when you love what you do.
Kathryn, what a wonderful post and I loved your take on the whole rocks, pebbles, sand, beer metaphor. My rocks are novels, shorts the pebbles, sand the quickie texts/emails. Beer is beer. I prefer honey wine from our bees :) I realize I need to spend the time with my rocks, though they be unwieldy instead of focusing on the pebbles, which are all shiny and small enough to play with, carry about in my pocket. I realize now how physically oriented I am. I need to see and touch, smell and taste, touch everything. This is why I crave the physical presence of the people I love. Letters are the next best thing. Phone calls and virtual stuff, though important for maintaining connections far away, are too ephemeral. Grateful for this writing life. Grateful for your words. Grateful for this community.
Hi Vijaya, right back at you in the gratitude department!
You raise an interesting question: must one prioritize writing novels? There are certainly brilliant short-story writers who have had wonderful careers. While there are similarities in skill set of course, I consider them two different forms that require different sensibilities. I don’t read short stories (don’t shoot me!) because when I finish them, I always tend to think, “Well shoot—I could be 45 minutes into a novel by now!” Since I’m not unique in any respect, my guess is you have different readers for each form as well. A reader earned is difficult to replace—I wouldn’t let yours down if I were you!
“…social media. I’d gained some visibility as an author, sure, yet gained no visible boost in sales.”
I have had little boost in sales, but social media is essential for those writers who are chronically ill and/or disabled – even if the people in all my support groups aren’t writers, enough are so I have somewhere my concerns are common fare, because the ‘outside world’ excludes people like me – by its design – from almost all ‘normal (ableist)’ congress with peers: we can’t get ‘there,’ if we could we’d have to turn around and go home almost immediately after we got there, and the logistics part has such a huge payback that we usually don’t even consider going.
It is estimated that 20% of adults have a significant disability, but it’s the isolation from others which keeps us from being effective in changing that world (and the disproportionate cost to us of being activists). It’s not a small problem, and long covid is going to make it hugely worse, and yet the real world wanders about like a headless chicken never making the better design choices claiming it’s too expensive – until they need it personally; then it’s too late. Vicious circle.
Social media needs to be used wisely, as anything, but its intangible benefits are very real.
I’m glad you brought this up Alicia. When drafting this post, I thought about whether I should even say that we should reach out of new experience when so many can’t leave their homes. And the thought of losing the relationships I’ve built with writers who deal with a variety of disabilities is one of the reasons I’ve been loath to disconnect completely from SM. Many friends who are book influencers have grown into their roles because of the way books have broadened their worlds and distracted them from constant pain, for instance. I have writing friends with anxiety so crippling they can’t make themselves take advantage of conferences and other meetups, even though they are physically able. Thanks for reminding us of this important issue. Hopefully we’ll see a new mix of people at the OnConference now that the travel requirement a non-issue.
It is estimated that 20% of adults are living with a disability severe enough to curtail their choices. Most posts – and advice – are pitched at the other 4/5ths of the population.
Disabled people were told for DECADES that accommodations necessary for them to, say, work from home, were too expensive and impractical – so no jobs were available for them. Then came covid – and now everyone has those accommodations (which many employers are now trying to remove again!).
I’m used to it, and feel a bit like Cassandra. Maybe there will be a post about The Secret Lives of…Disabled and Chronically Ill Writers. I treasure my online friendships and connections, because I have access to so few of the other kind. But it will be hard to replicate a lot of things without effort, including the casual camaraderie of the people whose table you share at lunch in the food court at the convention.
You usually have something useful for us all, Kathryn, but this one has me trying to remember where I left my souvenir golf ball. (I used to live down the block from a driving range.) I had never heard the golf ball vs. sand idea, and it is a powerful reminder. So useful that I plan to put my golf ball somewhere on my desk. I don’t really need the giant jar and I’ll be damned if I’ll dump a beer in there. In response to Barry’s take on it, I say no to golf, but I’m fascinated by golf balls. Cheers.
That’s a great idea, Michael—I hope you find your golf ball! (I have an Obi-Wan Kenobi action figure on my desk. When all seems lost in my writing, I whisper, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!”)
And I agree 💯 about the beer. #savethebeer
Unless your jar is air tight, Kathryn, you will always have room. This I Know: writing daily is hospitable to my muse. She always guides me to the meaningful and I am fulfilled. God bless life.
Be well and prosper.
Sally M Singer
Thanks for stopping by, Sally! Glad your muse is speaking loud and clear.
Kathryn, Love this post. Thank you for reminding me what is important and how to visually quantify it. xo L2