Creative Writing for the Worker-From-Home
Finding the Time and Distance to Write
Spectrum has launched. I repeat: Spectrum has launched. Spectrum is an anthology of queer, neurodiverse short horror fiction, edited by Aquino Loayza, Freydís Moon, and Lor Gisalson. This anthology contains twenty short stories, including mine—“These Thirteen Simple Tricks Will End Your Sleep Hallucinations For Good.” You can order Spectrum at Third Estate Books or snag the Kindle edition from Amazon. What are you waiting for? You could be reading it right now!
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Good morning. I hope everyone received a nice little refund from the tax fairy under their pillow last night.
Show of hands: Who here likes working from home?
My partner has just had to return to the office a couple days a week, starting this month. It’s been horrid, for both of us. I don’t know what to do with myself, alone in the house, with only two dogs and a parrot for company. I mean I know what to do with myself—work, from home—but it’s weird being in the house by myself after four years of both of us being home all day, every day.
Now: I was already a worker-from-home. My job was about 99 percent remote even before the initial COVID lockdown—it’s been that way since I started working there in 2015. Before I moved in with my partner, I lived alone and for the record had only one dog and no parrots.
That’s the ideal parrot situation, honestly. If you have a choice in how many parrots you have (we didn’t), choose zero. This right here is the best advice Shelf Life has for you today. Learning from my misfortune is the whole point of this publication.
So anyway, what I’m getting at is I’m a veteran of the work-from-home movement, as many of us now are. I find it has mainly upsides: For one thing, my office is an hour away on a good day, ninety minutes away when traffic is bad. Every day I work from home saves me between two and three hours of driving, which is amazing. That’s two or three more hours I can put toward literally anything else, writing included. I also save gas, wear and tear on my car, and all the little the daily costs of working in an office, like going out for a coffee or lunch with colleagues. I’m able to eat healthier lunches at home. I can walk my dogs in the middle of the day. It’s great. I’ll never knock it.
There are some downsides, though. For one, I have an enormous wardrobe of work clothes that I rarely get to wear. I have fewer excuses to put on makeup. There’s no one in my home with a candy bowl they refill periodically with fun chocolates. Those are the things I mostly miss about the office. Also I have a huge whiteboard in my office, and I don’t have one at home. I suppose I could get one. But they’re surprisingly expensive.
The other downside, the main one that I want to talk about today, is the difficulty of separating work work from creative work—specifically writing—when you work from home.
If you work from home, you are likely to working at a computer all day. This is how we do it, after all. Virtual private networks, remote desktops, high-speed internet lines, Zoom phones, and so on—right? It’s all on the computer.
If your creative pursuit is writing, you probably also do that at a computer. I know some folks like to write longhand and some like to take voice notes, but I think many or most of us write at a computer using a word processor. It’s often the most efficient way to get text onto paper. And it definitely saves your wrist. Longhand writing is harder than I remember it being when I was in school.
So anyway a funny thing just happened. And I’m not kidding, nor am I making this up to suit the article I’m writing. The window into which I’m typing is a web browser with Google docs open. That’s my writing suite: Google docs. I have 28 other tabs open in this browser window: seven of them are Gmail; five are online shops; two are social media sites; several are reference sites like Merriam-Webster—just a ton of stuff.
Okay, stay with me. I also have three more windows open behind this window, but staggered so I can see parts of them. One is Facebook Messenger so I can chat with my brother, one is Discord so I can chat with my friends, and one of them is Microsoft Edge. While I was working on this article, Microsoft Edge just randomly refreshed Teams and showed me a work conversation that had continued going after I left work today.
What I’m saying is, while I was at this computer working on Shelf Life on my own personal writing time, the computer itself with no input from me refreshed my work application, which got my attention, distracted me, and suddenly I’m back at work again. At mumbledy-mumble hour of the night.
Someone who has better digital hygiene than me might not have this issue. I know it’s a best practice to shut down the browser with all my work applications in the evening. It need not have been a desktop computer window, although it’s funny that it was. It could have been my phone notifying me or something else. The point is that it’s hard to draw a boundary between work life and non–work life when you do both things in your home. And when your creative process relies on the same workspace and tools as your day job, things get muddied further.
I’m about to offer some advice on how to separate work and creative work although I realize, having just been distracted from my creative work by my work work, you have to consider the source. I’m not following my own advice at just this moment. I do follow it sometimes with better results. Herewith, my advice on how to keep your work life from bleeding over into and contaminating your writing life, when both lives are, unfortunately, bedfellows.
1. Use a Different Computer
This is not going to be practical for everyone, and I know that. Just putting it front and center. Not everyone can afford to have different computers for different purposes and not everyone wants multiple computers junking up their space.
I’m in the second camp—too many computers junking up my space. I have a company-issued laptop that stays in the laptop bag unless I go to my office. I have my personal laptop, through which I use a VPN to connect to work and which I also use for writing and playing video games and paying my bills and everything else. This is my “main” computer. I also have my phone, a supercomputer in itself, but not one I find conducive to working or writing.
The main laptop can present challenges for writing. Because I use it for so many things, my brain doesn’t settle easily into writing mode when I sit down in front of it. I get distracted—do I need to pay the credit card? Did I remember to order my dog’s medicine from Chewy? What’s my work schedule like tomorrow, do I have early meetings? Should I check?
What has helped me a lot is the purchase of a Chromebook that I use exclusively for writing. Note that a Chromebook won’t be the best choice for anyone whose writing suite does not have a web app component, because Chromebooks only run the web, they don’t run desktop applications like Word. (There’s probably a Word app you can use on Chromebook, but I don’t know anything about it.) Chromebooks are nice because they’re very portable and inexpensive. Mine weighs about 2 lbs and cost under $200 and is red.
Windows laptops, which will run Word just fine, are available at a similar price point. MacBooks are more expensive but also they’re MacBooks.
Having a separate laptop for writing has been very helpful for me. While I usually write Shelf Life on the main laptop, all my fiction writing is done on the Chromebook. The benefits of this are:
My brain goes into fiction writing mode when I pick up that laptop, since I don’t use it for anything else.
Chromebook’s application limitation prevents me from getting distracted by social media or video games.
Can work from a room other than my home office.
Which brings me to point number two:
2. Separate Your Creative Space from Your Work Space
I’m a big believer in the power of immediate environment over the human brain. This is why I never work in the bedroom and I don’t do my fiction writing in the home office. Your brain gets conditioned to expect something from the spaces you spend time in and I have a really hard time making my brain do fiction when it’s in the workspace.
So, fun fact, we have a guest room which is also the room where my houseplants live. My large dog is not allowed on the master bed but she is allowed on the guest bed (I obviously launder the linens before guests come over to save them from her red fur tornado). So sometimes I take a nap in the guest room so I can cuddle my dog. Otherwise, I only go in there to tend to the plants. Result: Going into the guest room makes me sleepy as heck. The only thing I do in there is relax with my plants and snuggle my dog. I walk into that room and my brain starts preparing for sleep.
Similarly, I use my office for working, writing Shelf Life, and playing video games—all of which are very serious business. But since I have my lightweight Chromebook for writing, I can write from some other part of the house when I want to write fiction. I can turn off the “serious business” brain function by leaving my office. The guest room is obviously not a good choice because it puts me into a coma, but I’ve had good luck with the living room for writing fiction. Or outdoors, if the weather is right for it.
3. Carve Out Time
The third and final danger of working from home—or at least the final one I’m discussing today—is earmarking time for creativity and writing.
When I worked in an office, my life was much more clearly segmented: You go to work and stay there for eight hours, then you come home and have personal time, then you sleep for eight hours. Since I work from home, I still work the same amount of hours, but the delineation between working and not working has become amorphous. I’m working, but I’m also tidying the kitchen, and taking out the trash, and throwing in a load of laundry, and having a virtual appointment with my therapist. I might start work at 8 in the morning and not finish till 6 in the evening, but two hours of those ten may have been spent doing other things since I’m not physically stuck in an office the full day.
This can make it really hard to know when work is “over” and personal time “starts.” Listen, I wouldn’t trade it for working in an office but it takes time management.
For me, it has been helpful to set clear (mental) boundaries around my writing time. Monday and Wednesday after 7pm is writing time. This is when I write Shelf Life. Every other Sunday from 2 to 4 is fiction-writing time—that’s when I have writing group. I’m definitely trying to get more dedicated fiction-writing time, which for me means committing to it and then putting an impenetrable boundary around that time so that nothing interferes with it.
The nice thing about working from home is, you can write during the time when you might have been preparing for work—dressing, putting on makeup, blow drying your hair, driving to the office—or during off times like your lunch break. If you’re not trapped in a cube, you’re free to do what you like. If you like writing, you’re all set.
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