When I’m not writing
or
How to Live It Up In Just Two Hours of Free Time a Week: A Writer’s Guide
From the author: While some of these tried and true “not writing” activities…well, actually involve writing, it is purely “for fun writing” and doesn’t count toward the writer’s “professional” writing.
- For a fabulous, free mood booster during the dark winter months, find a nearby river or other body of water…and jump into it. Seriously. It’s actually quite easy to do; simply run toward the icy river, screaming obscenities, and fall face-first into two feet of water, and run back to your car. Also, while you don’t technically need a swimsuit, check your specific state’s laws, just in case.
- If you work from home, keep your surroundings interesting by rearranging your entire living room…often. After you exhaust all possible placements of the couch, you might try switching your bedroom with your living room, just to see if anyone notices. Repeat until your roommate/significant other threatens to bolt everything to the floor.
- Visit a second-run movie theater and watch an awful flick like Birdemic or Battlefield Earth. Seeing something terrible that became at least modestly successful will encourage your writing. Need a more social way to spend your two hours? Share these terrible movies with friends in your yard, using a sheet and a borrowed projector! Neighbors will love hearing the comically bad scripts—especially those that involve gunshots, explosions, and excessive screaming.
- Most writers don’t have time to shop for groceries and learn to cook and eat at a table with actual plates and then do dishes—and not three times a day! Add exercising and seeing what it’s like outside to that list and suddenly you don’t have any free time at all! Instead, combine all three chores into one: Enjoy a brisk jog in the great outdoors to a nearby café, food cart, or mini-mart. Buy an affordable meal and jog back. To gain extra time, choose foods you can eat with one hand so you can sneak in some stolen writing time. To take back even more time, put a tall, standing table over your treadmill so you never have to stop writing to exercise again.
- Impulsively buy any song on iTunes that gets stuck in your head. The small pleasure of immediately acquiring something you want can give you a feeling of accomplishment that you may not get from your writing for years.
- Buy every book that is recommended to you and start reading immediately, regardless of how many other books you’re in the middle of. Read them in fifteen minute stints, alternating books. The math begins to get complicated, but, in theory, you should be able to finish four books in a year. TIP: Do not tweet the same title every week for #fridayreads; try tagging chapter names instead so your followers won’t notice it took you seven months to finish Dave Egger’s What is the What.
- Bonus free time activity, just in time for Halloween! While this breaks the rule of only two hours of fun per week, this holiday activity is worth the time splurge. Make an overnight reservation with a friend to stay in a state park yurt with a creepy name, like Devil’s Lake. Your goal, from nightfall until midnight, is to each write a scary story using the park you’re staying in as the story’s setting. At midnight, pencils go down and you flip a coin to see who reads aloud first…! Winner is the last person to run screaming into the dark and lock themselves inside their car.
- Molly E. Johnson is the author of Spartacus and the Circus of Shadows, a middle grade novel from RainTown Press.
