Typical Day

I have decided to run down a typical day for me as a high school librarian and an author. My goal is to piggyback on the last post which was about finding the time to write. I have been very lucky and have met many authors in the past twelve years and I would say 90% of them have day jobs. Making realy money as an author is tough and that is not something I’m going to write about now as I don’t feel confident enough to do it. I’m not trying to say my job is tougher than anyone else’s, I’m trying to outline how hard it can be to carve out that time to write. I’ll also point out that I love my job!

So here’s a typical day for me:

5:15 am: Wake up and drag my sorry self out of bed and get other less willing members of the family out of bed and ready for school.

6:30 - 6:40 am: Leave for the school.

7:15 - 7:25 am: Arrive at the school and open the library, there will be at least three children waiting for me to open the library.

7:45: the library is very busy and by 8:00 it will have around 100 students in it.

8:00 - 8:30: Check in / check out books, monitor behaviour in the library and get students out of the library at 8:30 to get to their registration time. I answer a lot of questions, check out a lot of books and do a ton of IT help with the computers.

8:30 - 8:55: Speak in an assembly, usually a Year 7, 8 or 9 one where I’ll speak to 250+ students, or, if I don’t speak at an assembly, I’ll help students in the library as there is usually a constant stream of them coming in. Sometimes I use this time to visit smaller classes to promote a book or an event.

8:55 - 10:55: Most days I will run 2 library lessons in this time period for Year 7 or 8 or help with a Year 9 one which is run like a book club.

10:55 - 11:15: Break time (the students’, not mine): We will have 100-120 students in the library using computers, reading, borrowing books, sitting and chatting. This is full-on and extremely busy, I can sometimes answer 10-15 questions in this time easily.

11:15 - 13:15 Another 2 library lessons, somedays we don’t have library lessons but others we do, it varies, but there’s usually at least one. If I do have a “free” hour it’s to shove food in my face, use the toilet (gross, but this is something non-school people might take for granted, how you can sometimes go 4 or 5 or more hours without eating or using the toilet while working in a school) or try to get ready for a lunch club or do admin on an upcoming event, trip or competition.

13:15: 14:05: Lunch (the students’, not mine): We run clubs everyday at lunch, so it will either be D&D, Manga Club, Book Club, Board Games Club, or it might be Film Club, Open Mic or a special event like a spelling bee or a themed quiz.

14:05 - 15:05: Period 5, usually we have a library lesson, and if not, I will be meeting with the mock trial team to rehearse. If this period is free, I will try to answer emails or use the coveted toilet if I did not during the first part of the day.

15:05 - 17:30: After school clubs, we run D&D and have many students in. Some of these are run by older students which gives us a break. I don’t have to stay until 17:30 most days as I’m very lucky to have a colleague and we switch hours.

17:00 to 20:00 Will be making supper, walking the dog, helping with homework, playing board games, cleaning up and checking work emails to ensure I haven’t missed something important.

20:00 - 21:00: Is when I write, and I try to keep this time sacred. As I said in the previous post, if I don’t get much done, it doesn’t matter, it will slowly build up. I’m usually asleep by 9:30 pm. That’s it, that’s my day!

Finding the time

I am in the position of being an author and having a book coming out in a few months which is very strange and fun and exciting at the same time. I still don't tell people that I am an author for some reason but when they do find out (usually because someone in my family tells them) they all, without fail, ask me how I find the time to write. They will then say something like, I would like to be a writer but I just don't have the time. I do not agree with this, but I guess I understand the sentiment. Everyone's situation is different but having a full time job working as a high school librarian can create challenges to finding time to write. 

And this is only my experience, everyone has a different experience and, in my opinion, since the invention of the mobile phone and the onslaught of distractions and information we are pummeled with every day, finding time to write can be very tricky. I'm not saying this will work for you, I'm just relaying how I carve out time to get some words down. 

I don't have a lot of time during the day. Contrary to popular belief, being a school librarian isn't sitting around reading books all day. 

My notebook has been a lifesaver. I never thought of myself as someone who would write in a notebook but in the past few years it has been my number one way to quickly jot down ideas. I don't take it everywhere but if I find myself at home I make sure it's nearby and I will write down ideas or even phrases that I like. I try to read a lot of poetry and look at a lot of art and as pompous as that might sound, it has been very influential and important to me in generating ideas. For example, I stumbled across Canadian poet Gwendolyn Macewen and her fantastic poem entitled Dark Pines Under Water and it gave me a lot of ideas regarding my main characters' motivation. I just threw down some keywords into the notebook and left them there for later.

I guess the question is, when do you transfer the ideas from the notebook to a Word doc or whatever you use. This is the tricky part and for me it does not result in sitting down and doing a long period of writing. My strategy in the past little while has been to leave my phone either turned off or in another room from a certain period of time in the evening. Again, I am lucky I can do this, some people might need to have contact with others at the ready and they cannot be far from their phone so I am aware this is not something everyone can do. In addition, I have removed some social media apps from my phone which has helped greatly. 

So in the evening, I try to sit down without my phone and get as much written down as I can. This might be two hundred words, it might be five hundred, it might be one hundred. I don't worry about it. And if I don't any words down that day I also don't get too worried at all. My goal is to seize small moments and either write down ideas in a notebook or to just write a few things down on the laptop. This might not work for everyone, some people might need a particular setting, music and surroundings to get any work done. For me, this sets me up for failure because I expect too much of myself when I create a "This is my moment to write" situation. 

That's how I do it, if I'm lucky, I get a thousand words a day, if not, it doesn't matter.  I just pick away at it when I can and when I have enough words that I'm happy with, I leave it for a month or so and then go back over it. It seems to work for me so far, and this is how I have been approaching it. 

counting words

 I’ve been writing for a long time, I probably took it (and myself, unfortunately) very seriously when I was around nineteen or twenty years old and I thought I’d write the next big Canadian novel. I never got anywhere with it during that time, but I wrote daily because I was young and I had a lot of time on my hands. Looking back, the stuff I wrote was pretty bad, but I’m glad I was able to at least not give up on it.

 As I got older, the writing slowed down a little but I still wrote every day. Then I read Stephen King’s On Writing like millions of other people and read that he hits a certain word count daily and I felt like I should be more “on it” in regards to word count.

So, for a very long time, I would not let myself rest unless I’d hit the 1,000 word mark. This was despite having a full time job and family commitments and what ended up happening was that it became a massive chore for me to do and any fun that I got out of it was drained away.

I also became quite hard on myself about it and really felt like I wasn’t a “real” writer unless I was hitting that particular word count every single day. It got so that I was just writing things to check the word count and the result was I’d go back and delete most of it anyway.

I don’t remember when I decided to stop doing this, there wasn’t really any kind of big moment or anything, it just became less and less important to me as I got older.

What has worked for me is writing things down in a notebook on some days and then on others sitting down with the laptop and taking a look at what I’ve written down. Some days I’ll get a couple of hundred words, sometimes a thousand, sometimes fifty, it’s all over the place but I feel the most important thing is that I’ve stopped beating myself over the head about it. Writing by hand has helped, because there’s no machine to count the words, and sometimes I’ll just write a synopsis of the novel over and over again and for the past two novels this little activity has helped me form better ideas. Sometimes I’ll just focus on one scene, like yesterday, I wanted to describe an abandoned gas station so I just looked at some images of an abandoned gas station and wrote everything down that I could. This equated to maybe two hundred words and that was enough for me for the day. None of this is rocket science or breaking new ground, I’m just reflecting on how badly I treated myself about word count and how little it matters in my opinion (deadlines are a different story, I suppose). My advice with word count is it’s fine if you don’t write every day, my approach has been to try to jot down by hand a few things daily and then go to the laptop a couple of times a week to take a look at what I’ve written down. In the end, don’t beat yourself up about word count.

in verse

I’m going to share something that happened to me writing-wise where I decided to completely change the style of writing for a new novel that I’ve written. For a long time I’ve wanted to write a verse novel, after reading great ones by Sarah Crossan, Louisa Reid and Gráinne O'Brien to name a few. I also have always felt like my writing was close to a kind of poetry and it is hard to say that without sounding very pretentious but that’s how I feel. I try to write in a semi-stream of consciousness way and I had a feeling that I could write something in verse that made an impact on the reader.

So I wrote a novel in verse, I really liked the characters and the theme and how it ended and everything but what I found was that I kept coming back to it to add more things here and there. As I did this, I noticed that the word count was creeping up and up and I felt like I had to make a decision, keep it as a verse novel (I really liked it that way), or convert it to a prose novel.

In the end I decided to simply make a copy of it and convert it to a prose novel. I have just finished the prose novel a day before writing this blog post. It took me a long time, a lot longer than I thought, but I really loved it, re-writing it and turning it into a prose novel. I found that the covnersion process really helpful to get my voice across in a way that I really wanted it for my protagonist, which is a kind of combination of Pony Boy and Holden Caulfield I guess. It also made me aware how much respect I have for authors who write in verse because it is extremely difficult and I don’t think I have the skill set to do it yet, as much as I wanted that story to become one. I feel like I struggle to put things down in a concise, effective way that a verse novel reqiures and maybe I rattle on too much but I found that I wasn’t getting across the voice I wanted in that format for that particular character.

I am not advising anyone to write in verse, but what I am saying is that it was a very fun challenge for me to write in verse in the first place and an even bigger challenge to convert it to a prose novel. I think I’m happier with it as a prose novel and I don’t think I’ll try this process again, even though it was kind of by accident. I hope to be able to write a verse novel I’m happy with in the future as I really enjoy reading them and as a librarian I know how effective they can be to hook students who claim they can’t find anything to read.

Again, the challenge was really fun and I really hope that these characters see the light of day at some point in the futre.

real life

I wrote the first line of my debut novel, A MILLION TINY MISSILES ALL AT ONCE, when I was nineteen years old. At that time I was really struggling and I won’t go into all of that. The point of this post is to talk about the idea of inserting real life issues into your writing. I have no idea how other people write, really, but I assume there’s always some element of real life in everyone’s work.

When I started writing my novel, I didn’t know what to write about other than the actual events that happened to me as a kid. I condensed them for timeline purposes, but as I racked up over one hundred rejections for the manuscript, I began to think that no one was really interested and maybe the story wasn’t engaging. However, when the novel finally did get published with the amazing Chicken House Books folks, I also had a realisation that people are going to be reading real things that happened to me and my family. This was a little daunting but also quite a relief in a strange way.

I don’t mind that people are aware of the odd and funny and I guess strange things that happened, but it can create interesting experiences. I was at an event where a person had read the proof of my novel and they approached me and wanted to know if the things that happened in the novel were true. I said that they were, and they replied that it made them very angry that a kid would have to go through that kind of stuff.

This was all done in a very positive way but I felt the need to defend my upbringing in a strange way because in a lot of ways I had a great childhood but I feel thta due to our circumstances we were a magnet for weird things. Throw in the fact that we lived in a small town with a lot of characters, many of them out of their minds on drugs and alcohol, and you have the possibility of some very strange and funny and tragic instances, which is what the book is about in some ways.

I think the point of this post is to highlight the fact that you do not necessarily have to write down all the personal stuff that happened to you in your life, it just seemed to fit the story I was trying to tell in that moment. I had to ask myself if the things that happened to me were actually interesting, and it turns out they were, to some people at least. I also had to be prepared for the fact that other people would read and be critical of what was essentially my life. No, it’s not a memoir, it’s a fictionalised version of things, but I guess it could be close to a memoir in some ways. 

I had to be ready that it was going to be edited and even before that I was very hesitant to let anyone read it because it was so personal. I think if you are going to write about your life in a fictionalised way you still need to be open to let others read it before you send it off to agents etc because if it does get picked up, a lot more people are going to be reading it. I think that’s it, try not to be defensive about it, even though I was very defensive for a long time and I can say that it really hindered me. Hopefully that’s helpful! Take it easy. - Lucas

my blog

get off your phone (A message to Myself)

Welcome to my blog. All I’m going to do on here is write about things that I hope might be helpful to other writers. Each post will be short. I’ve been writing a long time but I’m new to being published so it’s probably better if I discuss the different ways I approach things rather than discuss the publishing business as a whole.

As of wirting this I have finished my second novel which I hope to find a home with a publisher soon. This is a book that I loved writing. I say this because although I also loved writing my first book, A Million Tiny Missiles All At Once, it was much harder to write because it was very personal. In my second book, I just decided to write about kids that get into trouble and went from there. In this post I’m going to discuss how I went about writing it and why I loved it so much.

I am not saying that all of these techniques will work for everyone, for some reasion it worked for me.

1: I got a lined journal and I wrote the synopsis over and over and over again. This might sound like I was in The Shining or something but although I did not do this for my first novel, I decided to do it because for some reason I needed to know what steps I was going to take to write this story.

For example, I wrote Boys meet behind the Kwik Way (which was a store I used to meet my friends at when I was a kid) and under that I wrote They discuss how to spend the last few days of their summer. I then put Chapter Two under that and wrote another few lines as to what these kids got up to.

My terrible handwriting as I try to work out a scene in the novel.

Again, this might not work for everyone, but it worked for me and it helped me form a synopsis that I wrote and rewrote until I was happy with it. Did the synopsis change over time/ Definitely, but having this plan helped me a great deal.

2: I went for walks without my phone. I just left my phone at home and took my dog out and walked around the neighbourhood and thought about things. This might sound pretentious or something but again, it seemed to work for me. I found a book on the sidewalk one night in the pouring rain and this book gave me a huge idea. Not the plot of the book (I didn’t read it, it was ruined) but the cover. It’s hard to explain but having this weird little accident of finding this book in the rain gave me an idea for a character’s side story that eventually became a huge part of the novel and I’m pretty sure that if I was on my phone I wouldn’t have spotted the book at all.

3: I read a lot poetry. I know that sounds lofty and pretentious but I read a ton of poetry and I find it helps me think of ideas. I just feel it opens the brain up to writing in less hacky and cliche ways. I find it hard to explain. I read Bukowski, Rumi, WB Yeats, WH Auden just to name a few. I try to read dark poems, Out, Out by Robert Frost with the line the buzzsaw snarled and rattled in the yard is genius in my opinion and a huge inspiration. So at night before bed, I’d leave my phone in another room and read these poems and just jot down ideas in a little notebook and things just kind of came along after a while.

I hope these are useful, you might be already doing them, other people may have articulated it better than me. I’m someone who tries to write in short spurts, when and where I can. This is why I try to have a notebook handy. If I overhear something cool or interesting, I jot it down. I think the overall message is get off your phone, it’s destroying your brain. This is me talking to myself, really. Take it easy.