Writer’s Tarantella

“…tarantella was danced solo by a supposed victim of a “tarantula” bite; it was agitated in character, lasted for hours or even up to days,…”

That pretty much describes my writing most days: sweating out copious amounts of toxins (read: hot chocolate) in solo, agitated delirium. Ordinarily, this would seem like writer’s heaven except…

…where before 2014 all my writing time was for poetry, now I have to share it between building a platform, maintaining a blog, branding myself and managing the business side of writing. With desperate, intricate footwork I’ve tried to maintain rhythm and not end up a squished spider on the floor. Sigh.

My Tarantella can use polishing.

With this in mind, I sat down to analyze my writing activities and how I could manage them intelligently so that what I really loved doing – writing poetry – would not get compromised.

Scribe’s Tips: Analyze Your Writing Activities

1 – List all writing activities and tasks. So for example, one of my writing activities is this blog. The tasks for it include brainstorming topics, researching topics, writing the blog, obtaining images or taking pictures, updating and promoting it. I broke all my writing down into the different activities and tasks, no matter how insignificant. Tasks that didn’t fit anywhere were classed as maintenance or administrative.

2 – Prioritize them. From most important to least important activity.

3 – Track them. Which activity is getting the chunk of time. This was illuminating since I realized some minor activities were the cause of major time suckage.

4 – Highlight frequency. Which are daily writing activities and which are weekly or monthly.

5 – Calendar. Plug recurring daily, weekly and monthly writing activities and tasks in your calendar such as updating blog (weekly) or submitting to journals (monthly)

The above analysis yields an overview of how your writing time is spent or misspent, where the bottlenecks are occuring and can give direction as to what needs to change in order for a more efficient use of your writing time.

Hope this works for you. Until next week!