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When Life Throws You Cow Patties

How to keep writing when life gets messy

by Janet Lane

I'm in a terrific email writer's support group where we set goals, post them, and encourage each other to complete them. One of my friends on this loop recently posted an interesting question: "How do you guys keep writing when life is tossing you cow patties and you don't have a catcher's mitt?"

What a good question! In an ideal world, we would all have a spacious office with limitless book shelves, an inspirational view, a comfortable chair and a virus-free computer that never burps or stutters. We would have efficient children who feed themselves, keep their rooms and other common areas neat, and do their homework without nagging. Said children would never have crises, family pets would never bite the mail man or soil the carpet or run away from home or become ill. And long-distance relatives would never make their problems, yours.

But life happens, and cow patties fly. There are class B cow patties, distracting problems of the everyday variety, and there are class A cow patties, serious life problems that rattle our serenity and take emotional prisoners (including the muse) along the way.

When life tosses these messy scenarios, we can still keep writing! Here's how to keep those words flowing despite the distracting challenges life sends our way.

Class B cow patties are more easily managed. For these we can:

* catch them, dispose of them properly and wash our hands

Create and maintain (maintaining is the key) a daily journal. Start each day with the date, and record three important goals you'd like to achieve. As interruptions and distractions take you from those goals, record what they are. Examples might be:

-- unexpected phone call from chatty brother, one hour.

-- Electrician arrived to wire new addition, thirty-five minutes.

-- Reading email and lost track of the time. Two hours.

Whatever it is, account for your time for a week. See where those flying patties are emanating, and .....

* dodge them

Run away from home. The library, or even just outside on the deck. Leave the phone inside, or, if you must bring it with you, use caller ID to screen the calls. If this brings feelings of guilt, consider it a planning strategy, and set aside fifteen minutes every two hours or so to return calls. This way, you're the master of your time. You're handling your distractions, rather than the other way around.

* let those cow patties dry on the concrete and use them for fuel. When family and loved ones call, always keep your note pad handy. Story ideas come from everywhere. Offer reassurances and solutions, if you've been invited to do so, and cut the conversation short. You have an appointment. You do, you know. You have an appointment to write. Guard your time. Assure your family member or friend that you will give some thought to their dilemma and get back to them if you think of anything else.

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Cow Patties - con't.

The Class A level of cow patties requires more planning and self-control.

Speaking for myself, I find much of my "Class A cow patty" material comes in the form of needy family. I have two teens, so there's immediate "needy" in my present family. Also, I wasn't blessed with a normal childhood family, so there are ample complexities floating around there, too. As our parents' aging-related problems surface, these messy baggage issues can adversely affect the efficiency with which we solve them. I have, even from a young age, assumed the role of peace-maker and problem-solver in my family, and if you have done this, too, you know how much time it can steal from your schedule.

Other cow patties might appear in the form of repeat out-of-town guests. Living in an attractive area of the country increases the risk of this happening to you during the tourist months.

To dodge this rather large cow patty, keep the hospitality bar low. No red carpet service. To stay with me, my friends and family need to be prepared to help themselves during the weekdays, which are my regular work days. I explain that, even though I have a home office, my schedule is the same as if I worked downtown, minus the commute time. I'm a minimal hostess. I provide the beds and linens, but it's self-serve for day-time meals. For breakfast I provide fruit and Danish rolls. If they don't like hazelnut flavored coffee, I invite them to drain the pot into a Thermos® and brew a batch of plain coffee for themselves. For lunch, Kaizer rolls and meat. I reserve meal times to visit, and I provide tourist info and directions and continue with my schedule. Of course, I join them for shopping excursions, as part of my own reward system. :-)

For stickier cow patty problems, like family bickering and unexpected crises, I try to isolate the anxiety and worrying. I turn to my daily calendar and reserve a time period for dealing with the problem. I'll say to myself, "Okay, this problem isn't going to go away. It has to be dealt with." But for those less-than-catastrophic problems, even worrying can be allocated. If I reserve 1 to 2 p.m.for addressing the problem, for example, it frees my mind for the rest of the time because I've set aside *that* particular time to angst over and solve/lessen/alleviate it. That helps.

And I apply Deepak Chopra's philosphy of not judging, of just accepting the situation. It simply "is." If I don't have to work up too much emotion judging other people's actions, I have more energy to devote to solutions.

I hope some of this proves helpful. To accomplish what we want in our lives, we need to save time for ourselves. I never used to, but somewhere along the line I realized that if I don't care about my life and my goals, no one else will care, either. And if you *communicate* that you care about your life and goals, and reinforce that message with the way your spend your time, eventually they'll "get" it and, if not respect you for it, at least begrudgingly acknowledge that that's the way it "is." Having accomplished that, you will have definitely dodged the major cow patties that threaten to keep you from your manuscript pages.