I have always had a hard time saying
“no.” I like people, and I always want to help good causes. This has led to
years of low pay in the nonprofit sector, tons of overwork, lots of volunteer
hours, and on the good side, an awful lot of great friends. It also leads
periodically to a terrible feeling of overload, that point I get to when I have
so many urgent or overdue or essential tasks to do that I’m paralyzed. How do
you prioritize when everything needs to be done RIGHT NOW?
When I get to that point, I have to move
into To-Do Triage. I list everything that’s demanding my attention (and get the
most depressing multi-page list). Then I move down the list, asking myself,
“What will happen if I don’t do this today?” If it isn’t job loss, client loss,
contract violation, child endangerment, arrest, etc., it doesn’t go on the much
tinier list to be dealt with right now.
The trouble is that you can’t live your
life in To-Do Triage. At least, I can’t. Not as a permanent lifestyle. Sooner
or later, you have to learn to say “no.” Even when it’s difficult. Even when
it’s going to hurt someone’s feelings (whether it should or not). Even when
it’s something you’d like to do. At least, if you want to write, you will.
Sooner or later, you have to learn to guard your time like a mother eagle with
her nestlings. And sooner or later, you’ll find yourself having to relearn it
all over again. At least, I do. (Maybe I’m just a slow learner, and all the rest
of you can learn this lesson once and for all, but it keeps coming up in new
guises in my life.)
I remember the first time I learned the
lesson of no. I was a young, broke mother of two (still in diapers) who wanted
to write. The advice manuals I read were aimed at men with wives and
secretaries or women with no children or enough money to hire help with the
house and the kids. Since there was three times as much month as there was
money, hiring anyone or anything was out of the question—I was washing cloth
diapers in the bathtub by hand and hanging on a clothesline to dry because we
hadn’t enough disposable income for the laundromat. Yet still I wound up the one in the
neighborhood who canvassed with kids in stroller and arms for the March of
Dimes and the American Cancer Society.
One day someone who knew how much I
wanted to write gave me a little book called Wake Up and Live by Dorothea Brande, who also wrote the wonderful On Becoming A Writer. As I read it, one
sentence leaped out at me: “As long as you cannot
bear the notion that there is a creature
under heaven who can regard you with an indifferent, an amused or hostile eye,
you will probably see to it
that you continue to fail with the utmost charm.”
I began carving out time and space for
my writing, and to do it without shortchanging my babies, I cut out television
and most of my community involvement. This lesson had to be relearned when
those babies were high schoolers, my new youngest was a toddler, and I became a
full-time student and a single working mother at the same time unexpectedly. It
returned to be learned again when my oldest two were grown, my youngest in
grade school, and I took on running a university women’s center that also
served the community. Every time it had to be learned in a different way with
different adjustments. Once I’d given up television, that option was no longer
open to me. At one point, I switched my writing to poetry because what time I
could create or steal was in such small fragments that it made novels impossible
to write.
Now that I’m writing novels again and
publishing them (as well as poetry and freelance work still), one of the
time-eaters is the promotion work we authors must all do to win the readers we
believe our books deserve. It’s not something that can be skimped on, and yet
the creative work of designing and writing new novels must go forward, as well.
For a while now, each request for my volunteer time and work has had to be
carefully weighed, and most reluctantly rejected. At this time, my major
volunteer commitment is our local chapter of Sisters in Crime, Border Crimes,
of which I’m president this year. Everything else must sadly fall by the
wayside—and some people are quite unhappy about that, as if they had the right
to my time and skills because I’ve given them in the past. I’ve had to learn to
deal with that.
What about the time book promotion
takes, however? With my first novel (this was never a real issue with my poetry
books and cookbook), I said “yes” to every opportunity, every event, every
guest blog, every interview, every podcast, everything. And I managed to write
books during that time, as well—and had the worst winter, healthwise, in many
years, having worn my body down. This year I’m trying to be more strategic
about the promotion opportunities I accept. I’m still saying “yes” to most of
them—it’s part of my job, and I know that—but I’m examining them more closely
and deciding against some that I don’t feel will be as useful for me. It’s
hard, but once again I’m learning that lesson, which is apparently one of my
life-lessons—“no” can be the friend of my writing and is necessary at times.
Charles Dickens, who was one of the
earliest and most successful self-promoting writers, put it best for writers in
any age when he said:
“‘It is only half an hour’ — ‘It is only
an afternoon’ — ‘It is only an evening,’ people say to me over and over again;
but they don’t know that it is impossible to command one’s self sometimes to
any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes — or that the mere
consciousness of an engagement will sometime worry a whole day … Whoever is
devoted to an art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and to
find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see
you, but I can’t help it; I must go in my way whether or no.”
Do you find it difficult to tell others “no”
when they want your time? If you’re a writer, how do you create ways to balance
the promotion and the writing?
