Writer’s Mindsets and Time Management
Somebody once said we become writers because we have the feeling that nobody’s really listening to what we say.
We all write for different reasons. And we’re taking different paths. If we are lucky, we get to selling some songs and some of us are even able to make a living with this. But often enough we stay forever in the background. Or nowhere. Sometimes that is our own choice. But, however, we never give up writing creatively.
There are two things we all have in common. We all feel the urge to express ourselves by writing in lyrical form. Secondly, we all suffer, more or less, under the necessity to organize our creativity.
But why do we write songs or poetry?
We could just start a journal and write down everything that bothers us or makes us happy. That would save us a lot of time and effort. But we don’t.
We choose to transform, disguise or decorate our experience, emotions and thoughts. We even put them in certain forms, which is not always an easy thing to do. But why the effort?
Because plain writing is not enough for a complex mind. We want to take the audience on a journey with us. They’re supposed to see or feel what we saw or felt. We want them to follow our thought or emotional process. But mostly, we still like leaving room for interpretation and individual opinion. It’s not the aim of a real artist to tell you what to think.
And that’s why we put on that effort. It’s not just public therapy, it’s a means of communication for us and leaving room for interpretation turns it more into a dialogue than a monologue.
If somebody responds positively to what we wrote, we know that there’s someone who understands and maybe even agrees. A basic desire everyone has.
The problem is, as a creative person you need a different approach to time management than other people do.
For writing good songs you have to have a certain “head-in-the-clouds“-mindset. In some way a distance from reality without losing it.
But that’s sometimes hard to implement in your real life. In real life, there are kids to be raised, bills to be paid, households to be done and often enough an employer to be kept content.
If you don’t have a career and or the necessary amount of money already, that is a real tough job. It’s almost like leading to lives or having two different minds. To me there are two ways. Either you are a really disciplined person or you’re not.
In first case, “traditional“ time management will do. You will be able to reserve a certain time of the day or week for your creativity. At that time everything else has to come second or third. You are very productive at that tim, maybe even using different creative techniques. The rest of your time you are a business and family person.
Personally, I find this kind of approach awfully exhausting.
I – like a lot of you, as I assume – am not really disciplined in working creatively. Trying to force myself to a creativity schedule made it almost impossible for me to actually do something creatively. And I found a thousand excuses for reacting this way.
My head is always a little up in the clouds. But I still couldn’t sit down at Tuesday 3:00 pm regularly and turn my muse on.
What can we do?
We have to be prepared at any time for any outburst of creativity that can happen. Always carry something to write and record with you. With smartphones and tablets is easier than ever.
You could use time better that otherwise would be wasted or time doing the housework, being on the bus, waiting outside the gym during your kid’s training etc.
To sum up some of the time management publications I read: Your creativity has to be the most important, most urgent issue to you, sometimes. Whenever YOU need it, Everyone and everything else have to stand back or you’ll never even get beyond the stage of motivation to the stage of realization.
