Last month, we enjoyed an insightful webinar with coach, podcaster, and author Christie Adams on Time Management for Writers. And in this post, I bring you a glimpse of the most valuable tips we learned from her.
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A Writer’s Wellbeing
Although some of us have a primary job that helps us pay the bills, we consider writing our genuine work. We do all it takes to squeeze our writing into our busy schedule, even if it means writing late at night after finishing our house chores, helping our children with their studies, etc., or at dawn before the world wakes up.
However, we forget to nourish the most important part of this tapestry with all this hustle: ourselves, and we get lost among our responsibilities.
Firstly, we are so active with the many things we have to do that we take our physical and mental health for granted, expecting to be always resilient. But, if we don’t take care of ourselves and our precious minds, we can get burned out quickly and waste our creativity.
Secondly, our time is unproductive if we don’t organize our schedule by prioritizing our most urgent tasks. We must give our work a defined time because life is worth enjoying, and writing is a huge part of that.
Time Management Tips
Here are the 13 tips Christie Adams that we discussed in that mastermind session. I hope they will bring you the motivation to look after yourself as the creative jewel that you are and help you to manage your time more effectively.
Look after yourself. You guessed it. This is paramount since we are the main piece of this creative puzzle. Adopt healthy habits that will help you feel energized and strong enough to carry with your to-do list.
Don’t forget your fair amounts of veggies, proteins, fruits, and carbohydrates.
Exercise every day for a minimum of 20 minutes, or take short walks.
Listening to music while you take your daily showers will revitalize you.
Pay attention to your mental health as well, especially if you are passing through a difficult time. Instead of lamenting and questioning your luck, ask what this experience teaches you, what you need to see, and how you can solve this problem. When we shift our questions, we will see different perspectives of the same situation and choose the best solution.
Find the time when you can commit to writing. Perhaps you are a morning person, and you have no trouble waking up early when your mind is the most creative. Or you love writing at night with your coffee or a glass of wine while your muse visits you. Keep in mind that blogging, writing emails, and posting on social media are also writing work, so make space for these tasks in your schedule.
Prepare a schedule and stick to it. Organize each activity (like work, blogging, creative writing, household duties, family time, exercise) by giving each task a defined time. Start your day early and finish what’s most important first. Prioritizing tasks and being disciplined are paramount to productivity.
Set daily achievable goals. Choose three to four goals max so you can commit to them. Once you achieve your daily aims, you will feel empowered and motivated.
Close the door when you write. Set a “no disturb” time and let your friends and family know that. Don’t think of anything else other than writing when you enter this space of time. When others see how serious you are about your writing, they will respect it as well.
Create your personal writing space. Whether it is your study or a corner in your parlor or bedroom, prepare a particular environment that will inspire you every time you come to write.
Save the information you find which can help you with your writing. Write down any idea or tip you read or hear as a writing prompt. This will allow you to remember what to look for next time and the subjects you need to learn and consider.
Schedule time every week for studying and learning new writing skills or topics. Modern writers must know about marketing, networking, and personal branding. You can also learn by listening to podcasts and reading the latest literary articles that shed light on these subjects. It is never too late to learn new stuff.
Set boundaries for your sake! By organizing your time and setting a limited time for each activity, you avoid burning out. Otherwise, you will resent losing your creativity.
Don’t overwork. If you are a workaholic, set the alarm in your phone or a timer to take several breaks during your day. Give yourself time to stretch, exercise, go for a walk, or do some yoga. Even dancing can help you boost your metabolism, drop some stress, and strengthen your muscles, bones, and brain. It is also okay to give yourself a day off if you feel overwhelmed with work.
Celebrate every goal achieved. You deserve a reward after meeting a deadline. Mini presents to yourself are genuinely motivating, like a book you always wanted to buy, a new colorful notebook, a day out, favorite ice cream, etc. Enjoy because you deserve it!
Delegate some tasks and share responsibilities. The state of your mental and emotional health will allow you to write your best. Divide the house chores and other tasks between you and your partner or grown kids. If you have younger children, ask a relative to babysit them for a few hours each week. Outsource tasks that someone else can do.
Keep a positive environment around you. Don’t listen to negative news or gossip, stop watching violent or depressing stuff, and don’t get involved in other peoples’ drama. These are sources of an unhealthy mind and soul. Instead, listen to music or motivational podcasts. Spend time with people that inspire and encourage you. Read inspirational quotes. Do things that make you happy. Invest time in nourishing and enhancing your wellbeing.
These tips will help you improve your time management and your emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing. When you feel well, you will write well!
Connect with Cristia HJ
I write what I write to bring hope to the brokenhearted and ignite the passion for life in the sleeping soul. I want my readers to connect with my characters and free their imagination while the world is still spinning. Because no matter what we do or from where we come, we are all made of dreams and stardust.
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An appositive is a modifier. It’s a noun or noun phrase that immediately follows another noun or noun phrase to further define it. You probably use appositives all the time without even realizing it. But are you punctuating them correctly?
Why am I devoting a blog to appositives? I’m so glad you asked!
Learning how to punctuate appositives—most often done with commas but sometimes with parentheses—isn’t difficult, but I see incorrect examples almost every day. The sad thing is that so many of this common appositive punctuation mistakes show up in Amazon book descriptions, websites, book reviews, and pretty much anywhere you find the written word.
So let’s review definitions, and then I’ll show you how easy it is to correctly punctuate whenever you use an appositive in your writing.
What Is an Appositive?
As a reminder, an appositive is a noun or noun phrase that provides additional information. Like other types of modifiers, an appositive can be essential (restrictive) or nonessential (nonrestrictive) to the sentence. Removing an essential modifier may cause confusion, but removing a nonessential one still leaves most of the meaning intact.
Essential: My cockatoo Snowflake attacked my computer.
Nonessential: My cockatoo, Snowflake, attacked my computer.
Snowflake’s handiwork the day she decided I was working too much.Snowflake the Cockatoo
What’s the difference, and why does it matter?
If I had more than one cockatoo, I wouldn’t use a comma—I’d want to make it clear that I’m discussing Snowflake and not another bird. I’m specifically throwing “Snowflake” under the bus (she deserves it, don’t you think?). If I delete her name (the essential modifier), I remove the clue that tells you which bird was the culprit, so I could be referring to one of several birds.
The second example is the one I personally would use because I only have one cockatoo, and her name is Snowflake. If I delete the appositive (her name), which is a nonessential modifier, you still know my only pet cockatoo created some trouble.
A good test is to use names of people you know. In this example, the writer has two daughters, so which example is correct?
My daughter Mary is ten years old
My daughter, Mary, is ten years old.
Answer: the first. The writer has another daughter, so removing the essential phrase in the second example creates confusion: “My daughter is ten years old” … but which daughter?
Appositives and Titles
The same principle applies when a proper name follows a descriptive title.
“Freelance editor, Candace Johnson, is writing this blog” is incorrect. Why? Remove my name and the sentence is confusing. No commas needed here: “Freelance editor Candace Johnson” is the noun phrase that is the subject of this sentence.
“Candace Johnson, freelance editor, is writing this blog” is correctly punctuated because “freelance editor” is not essential to the sentence’s meaning.
Here’s another example taken from something I read recently:
“The science fiction author, Philip Dick, may have said it best.”
You see the problem, right? By removing what the writer thought was an appositive (Philip Dick’s name), the sentence makes no sense. Correctly punctuated, this sentence should read,
“The science fiction author Philip Dick may have said it best.”
How to Avoid Appositive Confusion
When you’re writing an appositive noun or phrase, always ask yourself if removing the information between the commas creates confusion.
Remember: if a word or phrase is essential or restrictive, meaning that it provides essential information about the noun or noun phrase it refers to, don’t use commas.
QUIZ
Now it’s your turn: which of the following sentences are correctly punctuated?
Thanks to my fiancé Mark Jones for his support while I wrote this book. (She has not been previously engaged.)
Actress Kate Hudson recalled one of her favorite memories from giving birth to her son, Bingham. (She has two sons.)
Speaker, author, and consultant, Mary Smith, is revolutionizing hair care.
My favorite pie, cherry, is out of stock.
Answers:
Mark Jones is the writers only fiancé, so use commas before and after his name.
Kate Hudson has two sons, so no comma.
Mary Smith is a speaker, author, and consultant, so no commas before or after her name (but the Oxford commas after “speaker” and “author” are correct).
My favorite pie is out of stock whether I name it or not, so use commas.
Do you have questions about the correct way to punctuate an appositive, perhaps in your book’s acknowledgments or in a blog? Please post them in the comments, and let’s work together to make your writing shine.
Happy Writing, Candace
Candace Johnson is a professional freelance editor, proofreader, writer, and writing coach for fiction and nonfiction. She works with traditional publishers, self-published authors, and independent book packagers. As an editorial specialist, Candace is passionate about offering her clients the opportunity to take their work to the next level. Learn more at her website https://changeitupediting.com, and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Look forward to Candace Johnson’s upcoming class in the Writers’ Mastermind
I know how you’re feeling. You’re afraid to look at it. You’re afraid you won’t know how to fix it.
That draft. Yep, it’s a mess.
Plot holes, limp dialogue, caricatures instead of characters, and a shallow theme that plays like a bad soundtrack throughout the story.
This is impossible to fix, you think. You avoid it like it’s your snide mother-in-law, a Jehovah’s Witness at the door, or that colonoscopy you’re supposed to schedule.
Yes, your story could be bad. Maybe it sucks.
But is it beyond redemption?
No story is beyond redemption. “Drafts” (notice the word is plural) are called drafts for a reason. You will have multiple iterations of the same story. Accept it as part of the process. No one writes a perfect book the first time.
Instead of dreading your crude first draft, get excited about watching its evolution. Dig through your words and find the little pockets of goodness inside. Expand on them.
Stay curious. Ask your characters questions. Write down the millions of possibilities for them.
Read your draft over and over again (no matter how much it hurts) until something sparks against the flint of your mind. Sit quietly. Clear the inner badgering and follow your gut instincts.
When we think of creating our fictional worlds, we tend to think in terms of landscapes, maps, these two-dimensional planes of existence. However, whilst this can be useful for creating scope – lots of characters and a wide, wide world to explore, a feeling of breadth – it is less useful for creating depth.
Function follows form, and so when we create literally “deep” worlds, we also create symbolically deep ones. The best example of this in classical literature is, of course, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, which sees a perilous descent through the Nine Circles of Hell, then an upward ascent of the mountain of Purgatory, and finally a flight into the Spheres of Heaven.
… understanding that stories should not only move along but also upward and downward along a vertical axis is pivotal to creating psychological and symbolic depth.
There are many reasons why this structure – vertical rather than horizontal – works at such a profound level. An obvious one is that our own consciousness seems to function this way. We sit at a conscious level most of the time, but when we dream or enter trances, we enter a subconscious state, a lower level, where intuition and creativity and more primordial forces hold sway. Beneath even that is the pure chaos of the unconscious, the maelstrom of desires and shared human memory.
One can easily map Dante’s tripartite tiers to the levels of consciousness. Hell is unconscious, roiling in its own filth and destruction, without any self-awareness. Purgatory is sub-conscious. There is a level of awareness, of self-insight, and the desires and energies of the unconscious have been filtered and harnessed towards progress here. Lastly, in Heaven, we are fully conscious – aware of ourselves and self-actualised.
This is only a cursory overview, but already we can see how deeply this system appeals to our natural psychology and spirituality. Most authors focus on lateral, horizontal movement – going from A to B. But in reality, stories should not only move from A to B, but also from the ground floor to the basement, and from the basement all the way upwards to the first storey.
To give contemporary examples of what I mean, we can look at two masterclasses in vertical storytelling. The first is The City by S. C. Mendes, published by the amazing folks at Blood Bound Books. This incredible novel is set in the 1910s, and revolves around a detective, Max Elliot; he wants to quit the force, but a gruesome murder reminiscent of one that went unsolved long years ago – a personal tragedy that broke Max, but which he now has a shot at gaining closure on with this new case – pulls him back in. In trying to solve this murder, Max discovers an occult secret at the heart of San Francisco, which leads him down a path of profane knowledge, and to a city deep underground.
Without giving too much away, not only is there a literal element of verticality in this storytelling (we must descend to reach The City), but there is also a figurative element, in that Max discovers the realities of what is lying beneath what we think we know – which includes traditional notions of morality. His descent into the eponymous City ultimately leads him to confront unimaginable degradations, horrors, and ritualistic “sins”.
There is more than a little sense of plummeting down Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell here, as each successive horror becomes more extreme, disturbing, and perverse. This gives the sense that we are not simply exploring a physical landscape, but the psyche of our own hero Max Elliot (who has seen horror in his time on the force, too), or, indeed, of the human race. What I loved about Mendes’ work is that it did not feel like I was being titillated with violence (the gore-porn that so often substitutes actual horror), but rather that there was coded symbolism in the violence that represented something deeper for our character, the wider plot, and indeed the human condition.
Most authors focus on lateral, horizontal movement – going from A to B. But in reality, stories should not only move from A to B, but also from the ground floor to the basement, and from the basement all the way upwards to the first storey.
This secret underground city is populated by mysterious lizard-people who predate humankind by quite some way; these symbolically seem to represent the cold, unfeeling reptilian part of the human brain – where there is only desire, fulfilment of those desires, and repetition.This reptilian part of the brain lies buried deep within us, but it is still there, regulating our unconscious breathing and prompting our need to eat, have sex, and sleep. This part of us knows nothing of societal norms – or perhaps obeys its own norms which we have become unfamiliar with – and so it is with the lizards of The City. In some sense, the lizard-people may represent a regression into an older – and perhaps more potent – form of being.
Certainly it seems that the ancient peoples, and even the early moderns, had far more of an affinity with sex and violence than we do. Our tastes seem ultimately voyeuristic and sterile by comparison with the blood-sacrifices of the Aztecs, the Bacchanalia of the Greeks, the gladiatorial games of Rome, or even the gruesome executions of the Elizabethans. This leads me nicely onto another aspect of “verticality” in fiction: our relationship with time.
In Will Shakespeare Die? by Gordon James, a title released by The Writing Collective in 2020, the verticality is almost entirely metaphorical. It is the past which is the murky basement, the lower level of hell, into which we must descend to learn the truth. In Will Shakespeare Die? the story unfolds over two timelines: the 1980s and Elizabethan England. In the ‘80s, Kit Morton and Thom Davenant are desperately trying to salvage the disastrous development of The Play, a theatrical production about Shakespeare’s life; to do this, Morton resorts to occult means.
In Elizabethan England, William Shakespeare also calls on occult magic to see how his story ends, whilst trying to thwart hidden forces closing in on him. Whilst the scenes in the relative “modern day” of the ‘80s are grim, it is the past which proves the true lower level of hell only accessible by means of magical incantation:
“Now with speed he poured more incense in, extinguished the altar lights, sat kneeling toward the triangle of manifestation upon the floor, crossing his arms upon his breast in a crossbones symbol. In the complete darkness he closes his eyes and repeated and repeated: ‘Allay Fortission, Fortissio, Allynsen Roa!’ Then nothing, except he alone in the profound quiet, waiting. ‘I greet you,’ he said, eyes still closed. ‘I greet you.’ The incense seemed to swirl around him, thick currents, sticky as treacle, but charred beyond sweetness. He felt like a man drowning…”
If we construe our consciousness as layers, built up over time, not only through our own experiences, but through the genetic memory passed down through DNA, then the past is a perfect cipher for the unconscious, the deep dreamworld we occasionally are granted access to via moments of clarity, insight, or illumination.
Clive Barker once wrote in his The Great and Secret Show that we access the dream-sea (which he calls “Quiddity”) three times during our life: when we’re born, when we fall in love with our soulmate, and when we die. I do not know if Gordon James has read much Clive Barker, but his story weirdly imitates this structure, as we enter the past only at moments of magical rebirth, intense love, or at the moment before death.
The strangeness of Will Shakespeare Die? is that this portal is double-sided, and whilst our modern characters are going down into the lower depths of “the past” and hell – Shakespeare’s secret England – our Shakespearean cast are visiting, or rather visioning, the 1980s. To them, the future is the dream-sea, an ineffable realm they are trying to ascend towards, but lack the means to fully do so.
I think there is a profound truth in this. When we get lost in looking backwards, trapped in the past, regressing, we are in a form of hell, and interestingly the redemptive notes only begin to creep into the novel when our ‘80s cast realise that they still have time to create a future for themselves, to look forward (or upwards, to extend the metaphor).
As you can see, understanding that stories should not only move along but also upward and downward along a vertical axis is pivotal to creating psychological and symbolic depth. Many writers neglect this aspect of storytelling to their detriment. There are many lessons to be learned from reading S. C. Mendes and Gordon James, and from exploring what the concept of “verticality” means in our own writing.
