I spent this past weekend presenting at the Write Now! writers’ conference in lovely Raleigh, North Carolina.

This isn’t a post about the benefits of attending a writers’ conference, although they are plentiful: fellowship, camaraderie, and support in a business that can often feel isolating; the chance to benefit from those navigating many of the same challenges you are or who might be a bit farther down the path; opportunities to learn and connect with many of the professionals who may one day help you in your career: agents, editors, publishers, and others.

At every one of these events, I always leave refreshed, inspired, and illuminated, and this one, put on by the Triangle Association of Freelancers, was no exception, the organization having served and connected area authors for the past twenty-plus years.

One of my favorite benes of this kind of event is the chance to just sit and talk shop with people who get what it’s like to be forging a creative career—who are navigating similar challenges, dealing with some of the same demons, and walking a similar path in a business that can sometimes feel like we’re treading it all alone.

At one point I found myself sitting in the lobby of the lovely NC State University event space where the conference was held, in a series of intriguing, enlightening, free-flowing conversations about creativity and creative careers as people stopped by, dropped in, drifted out.

In my opening keynote speech I’d talked about the idea of our writing careers as our own freelance business, what author and entrepreneur Paul Jarvis calls “a company of one.” That’s actually what anyone building a creative career is doing: running their own business, serving as CEO, CFO, CTO, and every other position—including manufacturing the product.

Anyone building a creative career is running their own business, serving as CEO, CFO, CTO, and every other position—including manufacturing the product.

It’s a lot, and much of the work is not necessarily what writers bargained for when they decided to pursue this path. Many of us fell in love with the creative side of it, the art, the writing itself, which is challenging enough.

But when you add in all the other elements building a successful writing career encompasses, it can be hard to figure out how to fit all of it in, as one of the people who sat down to chat asked me about. A writer and also an editor building her business, she wanted to know how I found time for both my editing work as well as the other creative work I do, my books and blog and articles and presentations, etc.

The answer, like the real secret to maintaining good health, is simple and commonsense and not especially sexy: You have to develop and maintain consistent habits that lead to the results you want.

It requires structure, routine, and a decent amount of discipline.

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Here’s what’s tough about this. The creative brain isn’t necessarily a regimented one. One of the most delicious things about creating is how free-range it can be, how our minds allow us to drift through endless skeins of our imagination, creating connections where they may not be obvious, weaving countless threads together into a vibrant many-colored tapestry. There’s a looseness and freedom to the process that can often be so much of what makes it exhilarating.

But that’s the art of a creative career. There’s also a business part, and that kind of unstructured exploration may not always lend itself to operating the nuts and bolts of our careers effectively.

The woman I was speaking to said she often had trouble with scheduling editing work around the rest of her life, pressing it into whatever available blocks of time she could snatch from day to day. I hear this from a lot of writers too.

It’s a well-worn trope to say that we should create a schedule for our writing, but clichés often become so for a reason: They’re based in common truths. 

Much fitness advice, for example, says you have to schedule your exercise and commit to showing up and doing the work or you will never develop healthy habits. Anyone who’s tried to grab a workout when a hole becomes available for it in their schedule knows that time rarely comes. Nature abhors a vacuum and something will always fill it, especially when we have to overcome obstacles both external and internal.

In our company of one as creatives, we also have to be our own project manager and create a practical, concrete plan for achieving our goals—and honor it, as much as is possible amid the vicissitudes of life.

For me that relies heavily on a foundation made of deadlines, schedules, and professionalism.

Deadlines

One of the issues the other editor and I discussed was setting parameters for the work you want to accomplish, whether you are naturally deadline-oriented or not.

Just as if you don’t set a clear and concrete finish line in your stories then they often lack shape and propulsion and readers may disengage, if you don’t do the same for your creative projects you’re likely to meander, stall out, and fail to accomplish your goals.

This is one of many reasons that in my editing work I offer authors a contract that includes clear and specific deadlines. It’s not just because it lets them know exactly when I expect to receive their manuscript and when they can expect their edited work back from me, so the project doesn’t fall into a black hole of amorphous waiting. It also provides structure and creates focus and efficiency on both our ends.

Having a finite date by which my work must be completed allows me to properly schedule the time to get it done.

Publishing being a bit of a fluid business, I also have to leave some flexibility to accommodate shifting production schedules, extension requests from authors, and other unexpected developments, so my deadlines offer a bit of wiggle room. If I know a job will actually take a week, I schedule it for three to four weeks on my end. It’s still a reasonable amount of time for the author to expect to get edits back, but it gives me movable pieces in the Jenga puzzle that creative-career scheduling can often be so that I can roll with these shifts.

I encourage you to create reasonable but firm deadlines for yourself with your own creative-career work—real ones, where you are held accountable for meeting them in some way, even if that’s just an announcement on social media of when you will complete a chapter or draft or round of revisions or any other element of your creative career.

When I wrote my first full-length manuscript I had an accountability buddy, a fellow writer also working on her first story. We agreed to send each other a certain number of words of our WIP at the end of each day—not to critique or even to comment on, but simply as a way of making ourselves responsible for meeting the schedule we had set for ourselves. That system is what finally allowed me to complete the story that became my first novel after many failed attempts to finish anything.

Schedule

The system I describe with my writing accountability partner was based on another element of instilling structure into your creative career: scheduling. To again liken this to story structure, once you know the goal your character is aiming for, you can map out the steps to move them ever closer to it step by step.

In building your creative career, once you have a deadline set for yourself, you can create a workable schedule that will allow you to meet it. With my writing buddy, if our daily writing deadline approached and I hadn’t completed my words I knew I’d better get busy.

Even with the Jenga schedule of my editing work, I have a firm final turn-in date for every project, which structures how and when I do the work in order to make sure I’m finished when I promised I would be. I’m not legally locked into it, even with our contract (there’s a clause for schedule shifts), and there have been times—just a few—where I have had to ask a writer for an extension when something unexpected came up in my schedule, just as frequently happens with authors. But otherwise I treat that deadline as if it’s ironclad, and that’s what creates my daily routines.

On a day-to-day basis, for the entirety of my freelance career my days have basically been structured the same way: Mornings are mine for whatever personal and professional creative projects I may be working on—articles and blog posts or course creation or working on a book, for instance. Afternoons are for editing other authors’ work. There are a few exceptions—for things like appointments or meetings, unforeseen crises, and lately a once-a-week pickleball game on Thursday mornings—but generally otherwise you will find me during those hours doing those things, without fail.

Trying to sandwich our creative or business work into found moments will rarely lead to the kind of regular productivity required for a successful career. Time has a way of filling itself up. Create a regular schedule for yourself and your work. That doesn’t have to be daily (no matter what Stephen King may do). Find what works for you, for your schedule, and for how you work best.

For me it’s every weekday, broken into morning and afternoon to accommodate both my editing and my creative work. Maybe it’s every morning at 5:30 a.m. for you, for a sacred half hour before your household stirs and your day gets hectic. Maybe it’s chunks of specifically allotted time on weekends. Maybe it’s every other lunch hour. It doesn’t have to be a huge block of time, and it doesn’t even have to be all at once; I’ll never forget my author friend Sherry Thomas telling me she wrote her first novel during her newborn son’s daily naps.

But for best results, it does have to be regular and it does have to be a routine, one you hold inviolate and commit to except on rare unavoidable occasions.

Professionalism

I told my new editor friend how I approach my workday every single day: Despite having worked self-employed from home for the entire duration of my career, I start every morning, after taking care of my dogs and other morning routines, by taking a shower, getting dressed in at least semiprofessional clothing, and tending to the same personal grooming I would if I had a job at an office—and then I sit down at my desk.

I wish I had a picture of her face, the combination of disbelief and guilt. She, like so many people who enjoy the luxury of operating their career from home, often stayed in her pajamas to work.

This seems like a minor consideration, but I think it’s important—and something I have been deliberately mindful of since day one of launching my freelance career: intentionally treating it as professionally as I would a “regular” job.

A professional demeanor and behavior is a subconscious message I send myself every single day: that this is my job, my career, and I am a professional within it. It encourages me to take myself dead seriously.

It’s a subconscious message I send myself every single day: that this is my job, my career, and I am a professional within it. It encourages me to take myself dead seriously in a way that working in pajamas or loungewear may not lend itself to.

It also puts up guardrails around my working life, separate from my personal life, a line it’s easy to bleed through when work is right there outside your bedroom door all the time.

My career and my creative work are deeply important to me, as I know they are to every one of you, but they do not constitute my entire life. It’s too easy to find yourself working all the time, robbing yourself of all the richness of the rest of your life: your family and friends and pets and other important relationships, your other hobbies and interests, and even just guilt-free unstructured downtime for whatever you choose to fill it with—or not.

My work ” uniform ” is a tangible reminder that work is work, which not only is another tool for helping me stay focused when I am working, but helps me close the door on it when my workday is finished, when if I want to I can change into my jammies or “soft pants”—even if you are a night owl and that’s at 11:00 p.m.

If you think this doesn’t affect or apply to you, watch any makeover show and see how profoundly someone’s outward presentation affects their inner attitude about themselves and their lives: You can see it immediately in their affect and demeanor, their self-image and self-confidence. When we’re more intentionally put-together we feel more like our best selves. We take ourselves more seriously.

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This is a business that’s often challenging, and can even be brutal. It seems uniquely designed to keep creatives feeling powerless and at the mercy of the many gatekeepers within our industry (even including our readers). 

Instilling more structure and scheduling and routine into how we navigate it is a big part of giving ourselves back a sense of control over our own careers, of agency and autonomy. It allows you to consciously create the work life that you want, the creative career that you dream of—day by day by day.

Your turn, authors—I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic, and how you structure your own creative work (if you do).