Freelancing Life -- My Freelancing Work Process (Patreon)

I’ve talked many times about ways I deal with writer’s block, burnout, and the hard work of creating game material professionally. What I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about is my normal writing process. Like, if I am feeling okay and tackling the day-to-day work of a writing career, what does that look like? It happens less often than it used to, thanks to the aftereffects of chemo + radiation to get my cancer into remission, but when it DOES happen, wow do I take the raw ylem of my ideas and turn them into the solid, formed matter of a finished project?

I’m talking here just about how I organize and tackle my writing–things like getting assignments, editing, and so on are outside the scope of this article. (Though if you want to hear more about those, let me know!)

Outlines

When I was first starting my writing career, I flat refused to use outlines. Outlines were, I felt, restrictive. Stifling. I didn’t know where my muse was going to take me, after all, so how could I outline it? Much better, I thought, to just begin at the beginning, and keep writing until I hit the end, and if that meant the project drifted all over the place, I could fix that in a second draft.

I was such a sweet, summer child.

Yes, you can fix things in a second draft. And if you are having trouble getting words on the screen, sometimes just throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks is a good idea. But the sooner you find problems with your writing, the easier they are to fix (and the less work you’ve done on things that are going to get cut).

So now I outline nearly everything. Often in very rough terms (maybe just listing out some potential headers), but enough for me to know where a piece is going to start, what it’ll cover, and how it will end.

I DO keep in mind my format, and this is a place where the years of being a developer for Paizo have really honed that skill. For example, if I know I want everything to break at the bottom of a page, I can do rough wordcounts so I write only as much as I need to do that. On the other hand, if something is going to be a 2-3 page pdf and never see print, I know it doesn’t matter nearly as much what my exact wordcounts are.

Prioritize, Schedule, Assess

Early in my career, I was often doing just fairly random magazine articles, and deadlines were pretty vague. I also usually worked on only one at a time, so I didn’t have to worry about priorities. Now I am often doing two-dozen things all at once, and some are for myself with loose deadlines, some are for myself with firm deadlines, some are for other folks with loose deadlines, and some are for other folks with hard deadlines (if a publisher needs a thing by a set date, it’s crucial I adhere to that–there are lots of steps after me writing something that need time, and big books that go into the retail market get announced way before they are finished).

So I need to know what I need to work on TODAY to hit deadlines. I prefer to work on 2-3 different things per day, so I keep a running list of what deadlines are upcoming, how far along those things are, and I (ideally) check it every work day. I also have the free tracking program Asana, which I use to track projects so they don’t get totally forgotten if I put them on the back burner for a few days or weeks. That helps make sure that if Rogue Genius Games needs marketing text from me before a product can be made available for sale, I get that done in a timely manner.

If I have an idea I can't begin yet, it gets noted so it’s not lost. I used to do that in physical notebooks. Then I moved to online files. Now, I use Asana.

Writing Time

The hope is to get 8 hours of writing done per day 5 days a week, and 4 hours 2 days a week. That actually usually takes me 10 and 5 hours, because when I find myself hitting a slowdown in my writing, I often take a short break to clear my mind. That may be 5 minutes on social media, or 15 minutes gluing bits of a model together, or 20 minutes on a computer game. Or a half-hour lunch break. Or even 45 minutes spending time with my wife. The idea is to pause, rather than let my writing urge go completely cool, but distract my mind with something different enough that I can come back at it ‘fresh” in a bit.

But it’s important to keep a running track of how much work is actually getting done, and what is due soon. If I am producing plenty of words per day (I shoot for a minimum of 3,000 words/day, spread out over various projects) and everything is on-track to hit deadline, I don’t worry overmuch how many minutes I spend on non-work-writing. But if my production slows, or I have something behind schedule, I get much more serious about making breaks short and infrequent. I try to get up and do something else for at least a few minutes every hour, but if the muse has me head-down writing for 3 hours, I don’t interrupt that process.

The Space

I have a dedicated work space–a home office I share with my wife. It has my laptop, current reference books, chargers for phones, a place for my cats to sit within-reach but off my desktop (though Cosmo, out big fluffy gray and brown tabby, often insists on sleeping against my belly anyway), a few hobby-related items, and a window (because getting some natural light is helpful to me).

The Reality

I used to manage this platonic model fairly often. At this point I'm lucky if I can pull it off once a month, though that is once a moth more often than I ever managed in 2023 or 2024 as I actively fought cancer. So if I can't manage this, I do NOT see it as a "failure." Instead, I both look to see if I need to adjust what I consider "standard" (I'm in my mid-50s now, and far more fragile than I used to be -- the norms I built in my 30s and 40s may not be appropriate for me anymore), and look to see if I need to adjust my next writing time to compensate.

Freelance writing work to life balance isn't easy. But at least for me, knowing what works best in the long term helps give me a standard to shoot for, and to adjust my behavior around if I'm not hitting it.

SUPPORT

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