Archive for ◊ August, 2009 ◊
Me: Okay, now that I’ve submitted my story, tell me honestly, did you even like it?
Him: Well . . .
Me: Well, did you?
Him: I liked it after I edited it.
**
Thankfully, the thick skin continues to serve me well.
I hate to admit this, but apparently, my language and my accent are easily influenced.
Not the swearing, I’m not talking about that. Because that’s something that’s been with me since 16, and I own it, and I won’t let anyone take credit for it.
No, I’m talking about other stuff.
Like, you know, like. I started saying “like” a lot when I was in California, and it annoyed the crap out of me. By the time I left, I was also saying “um” a lot, as if I couldn’t pull a sentence together without having to stop and um, think.
I had never spoken that way before, and I hated that I was doing so now. I kinda like how I sound, but I didn’t sound like me anymore.
Thankfully, I’m back and all the ums and likes have been kicked right out of me (well, most of ‘em anyway). There’s a good chance, though, that I might start talking like a Brit.
Bugger.
A few years ago, I felt I was becoming a bit of a slacker, and so decided that it would be fun to track how much time I’m spending on what. I installed free software that would have me fill in how I spent every 30-minute segment of the day.
What a bad, bad idea.
For one, it actually takes more work to do that than the actual work itself. Second, you have to remember to keep jotting it down. And finally, it’s not fun. It makes work WORK. Part of what I love about my job is that for the most part, I feel like I’m doing what I like. I get to talk to interesting people, I get to read a lot, and I get to write about things that I think matter. To me, those are all things I enjoy. Most of the time, I zip through my day. It doesn’t feel like I’m working, I’m not looking at the clock hoping to stop. It’s just an extension of my life. But when I have to sit down and track every 30-minute segment– THAT feels like work.
It would really make me dread the day. Who knows, in the long run, it might have been good for me. But I didn’t like it.
For freelancers, I don’t think these systems work. Mostly because it doesn’t matter how much we’ve worked or not worked. We don’t get paid by the hour or the day, so it doesn’t matter if we’ve worked a 90-hour week if we haven’t met our income or productivity goals. And if we’ve only worked 10 hours but finished everything on our to-do list and made our money for the week, there’s no reason why we can’t go out and play. Our income is typically not dependent on hours worked or articles submitted, and hence measuring it by that standard doesn’t work.
Then, of course, we’re writers and journalists.
When I was leaving the one and only full-time job I’ve ever held (I worked for a magazine), they were instituting a policy of having you e-mail your boss at the end of every day stating what you’d accomplished that day. While that sounds great in theory, it doesn’t actually work. It might work if you do it yourself because you know how much work went into finding a source or scheduling that interview, but when you put it in an e-mail, it simply reads: scheduled interview. It looks like you’ve done nothing, when you’ve actually spent weeks negotiating with the PR people to get the interview with that CEO who’s done nothing but grunt through your one-hour interview.
When you say you wrote an article, it doesn’t accurately depict the time you may have spent to research, uncover statistics, or check every single fact to make sure it’s correct.
Journalists, whether or not they think in a linear fashion, certainly don’t work in a linear fashion. The whole story is a mess of research and interviews until it comes together. It doesn’t work sequentially. Some of us write while we’re reporting, some of us won’t start until we have all the transcribed interviews, notes, and research right in front of us.
So expecting to give an update (to yourself or your boss) on sequence-by-sequence progress is pointless. It’s also ignoring the fact that many of us usually need to step away from a story–get a drink or take a long walk in the park– to figure out a structure or a particularly challenging beginning. That’s work too. But it’s not something you can put on a timesheet.
My timesheets make me look like a slacker even though I’m one of the most productive people I know.
I haven’t yet worked out a perfect system for freelancers (me, basically) for tracking productivity, but I do have to keep a tab on my income. I have a monthly goal, and if I think I’m going to go below that number, I really need to push harder and do intense work (likely marketing). If I’m hovering around or above my medium, I’m fine but I can do better. And if I’m near my target, I can (and should) probably take the rest of the month off and go enjoy myself. (Or maybe finish those assignments.)
One of the things I love about freelancing and journalism is the ability to structure my time and day according to my convenience. It’s not always like that– I do have deadlines to meet and editors breathing down my neck– but I can create my own measures of achievement rather than be bogged down by someone else’s idea of what is considered a productive day.
I’m procrastinating on:
(a) reading a contract
(b) doing edits on a story
(c) replying to e-mails
(d) scheduling interviews
And you?
People assume that because I’m so sure now of what I want and seem so focused on getting it, that I always have.
This isn’t true.
For a long time, I struggled. I didn’t always admit it, because I was ashamed of my struggle. People came to this blog to see a freelance writer at work. People wrote to me saying things like, “If you can do it all the way from India, there’s no reason I can’t do it from here in America.” I got so much great feedback, so much love and support, that admitting that I was struggling was like admitting that I had failed not only my dreams, but my readers’ dreams as well.
So I quietly fought the need to do more, to maybe quit writing, to admit that I was meant to do something else.
Until early 2006, I wasn’t doing any journalism. I was writing how-to features for magazines on technology and health. I’m not knocking anyone who does that kind of work, but I loathed it. I was very unhappy. Every assignment was a chore, a reminder that I had quit high-paying engineering to do something that made me equally, if not more miserable, and paid nowhere close to it.
In mid-2005, I started looking at graduate programs. I also, eventually tired of my struggle, walked all the way to my old high school, and asked to see the principal. I was going to apply for the job of an English teacher.
“Did you see the ad?” asked Ram Jeevan bhaiya, one of the workers at the school, who was loved by all students and who I knew well.
“What ad?” I replied.
“The ad in the papers today. For an English teacher.”
I hadn’t. What perfect timing, I thought. Serendipity. I’m meant to get this job.
Sure enough, I was called in for an interview almost immediately, and the principal sat me down and spoke with me for half an hour. We discussed my work, my writing, my life so far, and why I was quitting freelancing to teach English.
When I’d finished my spiel, the principal sighed, took off her glasses, and looked straight at me.
“You’re not a teacher,” she said. “You’re a writer. Can’t you see that?”
I opened my mouth to explain, but she put up a hand.
“Come back in six months,” she said. “If you’re still interested in being a teacher, I’ll give you a job. But I know, as you should, that you’re not going to come back.”
She was right, of course. Exactly six months later, I was traveling for my first reporting assignment for Elle magazine covering the one-year anniversary of the South Asian tsunami.
I came back from that assignment a changed person. After months of saying, “I don’t know what I want, I just know what I don’t want,” I finally knew exactly what I wanted.
It didn’t get easier, if you’re thinking all my problems were solved after that one assignment. In fact, they were just beginning. Because after I’d successfully rejected thousands of dollars worth of technology and health assignments to free up my time for meaningful work, I realized that I didn’t actually have any.
Not only that, I didn’t have any journalism experience. In 2006, after three years of making a living as a writer, I was starting over. It was quite scary.
I made almost no money over the next year.
I’m sharing this story now because once again today, someone looked at me with awe and said she was envious of me because I was so sure of what I wanted. She, on the other hand, hadn’t yet figured out her path.
And I just want to say, it wasn’t simple for me either. But what I did manage to do was get my head out of my ass and just be. Just be quiet instead of running round and round in circles, chasing my tail like a dog. I had to see what I came up with when I was at peace and wasn’t trying to follow someone else’s dream.
I see so many writers, day after day, who’re struggling with who they’re meant to be, what they’re meant to do. And I think the only way to do it is to try. Do all of it. See what brings you the most joy. Read your favorite magazines. Tear out the articles you wish you’d written. Draw. Paint. Take photographs. Don’t hold yourself back. Don’t limit yourself. Be creative. Be artsy. Drink lots of tea. Stay up three nights in a row. Write a short story. Paint all the chairs in the house. Don’t be in a hurry to declare yourself a certain kind of writer, artist or photographer.
Try everything that brings you joy. Something will surely stick. And until it doesn’t, at least you’re having fun.
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