Yes, You Have Time To Write That Novel

Many of us have grand plans - write a book, start a non-profit, go back to school - but who has time with a full-time job?
Well, Jael McHenry found the time. This debut novelist, whose book The Kitchen Daughter is out from Simon & Schuster this week, cranked out her prose while putting in serious hours at the marketing communications job she still holds. She shares how she made it happen.
Q. Many of us have aspirations to write a novel or do some other big creative project. What pushed you to get started and (more importantly) finish?
A. The Kitchen Daughter is a project I started toward the end of 2007. I had just moved to a new city, Philadelphia, and I was doing a lot of cooking. The idea came from there [The Kitchen Daughter features a main character who finds solace in cooking after her parents' deaths]. It took about a year to get the book into shape to show to agents. After I signed with my agent I also did some rewriting of the book based on her recommendations, and knowing that she was waiting to see the rewritten version always motivated me to get those revisions done.
Q. Describe your schedule while you were writing your novel. How did you carve out time?
A. My day job takes 40 to 50 hours a week and I do need to be available to my coworkers on a 9-to-5 weekday schedule, so my novel-writing time was all evening, weekend, and vacation hours. I'm lucky in that once I have an idea squarely in my head, I write pretty quickly. Some people do better with a set time every day, for an hour or two at a time. For me, it's more effective to set aside a whole day and just charge through that first draft. If I can write 10,000 words on a Saturday â€" which I can if it's first-draft stuff â€" that's only six Saturdays to get a short first draft down, 40 pages at a time. Then I revise, and revise, and revise, which can be done in increments of as little as 15 minutes. But I always set goals and deadlines. If you just say "I'll work on it when I can,” there's a big danger you'll never get around to it.
Q. Did your novel writing and your day job ever conflict with each other?
A. During the writing stage, they never did. Now that the book is being published and I have some promotion responsibilities, it's a little different, and I do have to take time off. You can time-shift writing. You can't time-shift a live radio interview. But I was able to do all the writing I wanted to do during the evening, weekend, and vacation hours I set aside for that purpose.
Q. What kind of day job is best for someone with artistic aspirations? What kind of job would be worst?
A. I know a lot of fiction writers who don't want writing as part of their day job, but it has worked out really well for me. I feel like every piece of writing I do, whether it's a newsletter or a novel or a brochure or a query letter, builds my skills. Any job you can leave at the office will work. Before I was in marketing communications I worked in another job that was much more deadline-driven and demanding, and even with supreme focus and prioritizing, if you're working 80 to 100 hours a week, your side project isn't going to get much attention. It's just math.
Q. What advice would you give anyone trying to handle two big roles at once?
A. Treat them both like jobs, and do everything you can to separate them. It's the same advice whether your side project is writing a novel or planning your wedding or organizing a volunteer event. Don't mix things together. Keep separate to-do lists, and put together a schedule for which project you work on when. If an idea comes to you at the wrong time, be disciplined and just write it down, then go back to what you were working on before. The same principles of organization that get you through one project will get you through two, so you just need to be as focused and as disciplined as you can--even if the nature of the project is creative.
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Readers, how have you balanced two big projects at once?
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