Holly Lisle: Writer

The Trouble With Working Hours

I’ve written one full, though short scene, and a good start on a second. Ended up deleting enough words, however, that my net gain is 182 words.

And again, I’m too tired to keep going.

This is why I prefer to write first thing in the morning.

Well, the kid’s first day of summer vacation is tomorrow, and he is staying up late watching movies and reading books, so perhaps I’ll be able to get an hour or two of fiction in tomorrow. And I won’t be answering questions or demonstrating techniques on long division. I need to figure out something, because as much as I enjoy the quiet of writing late at night, I just don’t have the stamina to work as hard as I need to.

I’m going to go to sleep, because that’s what I realized I was doing anyway. Falling asleep over a laptop?—not recommended.

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5 responses to “The Trouble With Working Hours”

  1. Holly Avatar
    Holly

    I’ve always by preference been a morning writer. I genuinely like getting up at five AM and having the whole universe to myself for a while. I like watching night become morning.

    Homeschooling an eleven-year-old who needs to have a solid grounding in mathematics if he is ever going to become the robot-designer he hopes to be when he grows up (or maintain his finances in any sort of order), and requiring him to actually learn, comprehend, and use correct grammar, to know history rather than to just memorize it, and to understand how everything he’s learning ties into the real world and how it works means that mornings during the school year are now taken up with explanations and demonstrations.

    I can write nonfiction under those circumstances. It is not particularly right-brain driven work—you can be interrupted eight times in two hours and still pick it back up. Writing a novel, though, is not so friendly to the brain-drill cries of, “Mom, this isn’t supposed to have a remainder, and it does.”

    Now that the kid can sleep in, I can have mornings. They’ll go away again after Labor Day.

    Reply
  2. TimK Avatar
    TimK

    I don’t know what I’m going to do when the kids get out of school. I usually find my most productive writing time is in the mid-morning–early-afternoon hours, during the quiet while the kids are at school, after I’ve had enough time to get my brain pumping but before the distraction that is my house after it turns into Grand Central Station for the children of the neighborhood.

    This is the first summer that I’ve been writing full-time under these living arrangements, and I fear that the summertime will end up being one distraction after another (except for the week or two that the girls are off at summer camp). I’ll obviously need to work out something so that I can get 4 hours or so of high-quality working time in. I might end up writing in the bedroom upstairs, because that’s far enough from the action that I won’t be bothered by it.

    I’d love to hear more about your summer writing arrangements and how it works out for you.

    -TimK

    Reply
  3. DasteRoad Avatar
    DasteRoad

    Holly, as I’ve said before, welcome to my world. I’ve always been a night-time writer until my daily habits changed drastically (started working in a PhD, moved in with my guy, so there was no mommy to take care of meals, cleaning and daily chores and so on). I found that I no longer had the stamina to actually do creative work by night: I preferred to just relax, watch a good movie with my guy or read a book. So I started getting up a lot earlier to allot a hour, a hour and a half when I was lucky, of writing time. I’ve been doing it from months now and it works nicely. Keep up the good work 🙂

    Reply
  4. djmills Avatar
    djmills

    I find the mornings are the best time to imagine and write scenes, but the afternoons are best to do editing. Don’t know why but it just works out that way. I guess my brain switches sides around lunch time, or maybe I just taught it to work that way.

    I hope your scenes come together after a good long sleep.

    Reply
  5. foxbrains Avatar
    foxbrains

    I agree falling asleep over a laptop is not good, but as long as you dont have a drooling problem you should be OK, otherwise both you and the laptop could be toast.

    Reply

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