Balancing School with Writing
Writing fiction is, for most of us, rarely a full-time job; it’s a labor of love. And for most of us, finding the time to devote to our craft is a struggle between family and other responsibilities both inside and outside the home. It’s hard to create a balance between the life we love and the writing we love.
And for those people who’ve made the choice to return to school to earn or finish a degree, that fragile balance can be broken easily. Whether you’ve rearranged your day to take classes at a local campus or you’ve enrolled in an online education program as a more convenient option to compliment your life’s responsibilities, working on your own fiction can seem impossible sometimes. But paying close attention to time management, finding ways to work your personal writing into your school work, and joining a writers’ group can help you stick to your goal of writing for yourself.
Time management
Time was tight before you decided to return to school, and you’ll have to stay on top of every spare moment in order to find time for your personal writing. Keeping a daily calendar is the best way to break your day into digestible bites and to create free time for your own writing. There are dozens of time management apps available online, but Google Calendar might be your best bet: you can merge your school and work calendars into Google Calendar, and it plays well with other Google apps too.
Evernote is another cloud-based app that allows you to take notes, audio or video clips, and keep to-do lists you can sync with your computer and smartphone. It’s especially helpful for times when you come up with story ideas and need to jot them down—you can create a notebook in Evernote specifically for your stories and story ideas and access them from anywhere, at any time. A limited edition of Evernote is free, and a premium version is $5 a month.
Work your fiction into your school work
Depending on the subject you’re studying, you can find ways to work your fiction into your assignments. It’ll be a stretch to work fiction into programs concentrated in the sciences, but if you’re taking a writing composition or a fiction writing class, ask your instructor if you can use some of your personal pieces for assignments. It can be a good way to merge your learning with your personal work, and it’s also a good way to get critiques from your instructors and fellow classmates.
Find a writers’ group
Having a group of people who keep you accountable to your work is a great way to stay on track. Whether it’s online or face-to-face, a writers’ group can help you generate ideas for your stories, find ways to fit writing into your schedule, and encourage you when things start to get overwhelming. There are local groups in every major metro area, but online writers’ groups may fit your schedule a little more easily. ForWriters.com has a long list of online writers’ groups to choose from—while some of them require a fee, most of them are free.
Your personal writing is important, but finding a way to balance your new life when you return to school is critical. With practice and determination, you’ll be able to find a way to do it all—even when your schedule gets hectic, you can stay devoted to your goal of personal writing.
