A TLC Guest Blog by Julia Forster
Have you been writing your work-in-progress for more years than you care to remember? If so, the good news is that you are among friends, including me.
For many writers, especially those with caring responsibilities or schedules bursting at the seams, it can be very hard to carve out enough time to complete a full-length work and get it out on submission. This was certainly the case for me. I wrote a poetry collection alongside supporting my two children through their transitions into secondary education while running a self-employed business, volunteering for a local well-being charity and sitting on various boards. This, all while keeping vaguely on top of housework and trying to stay in good health.
In all, it took me ten years from conception of the writing project to acceptance of the manuscript by a publisher. In this blog post, I’m going to share five things which I did to find ease with the project and to fit it in around my various responsibilities and I’ve framed some coaching questions to ask yourself to help you keep going.
1. Choose a form which blends with your current commitments
One of the reasons I chose the form of poetry for my third book is that, as a mum to teenage kids, top of my priority list was keeping a fridge fully stocked and my phone on charge so I could be an impromptu taxi driver. Life came first, writing second. For that reason, shorter form works were far easier to integrate into my daily life. I would be able to write an initial draft of a poem in an afternoon’s writing session, and then edit it over the weeks and months afterwards, either through attending workshops or working on the individual poems at home. The prospect of writing prose while I had such little time felt overwhelming, so I refined my goal to align with my life stage.
What life stage are you at now and what genre might vibe well with it?
2. Break your project down
When I was diagnosed with a chronic health condition, this meant I had to reduce stress levels. One of the ways I did this was to break down large tasks related to my work-in-progress into smaller, more manageable chunks. Breaking up my year into quarters and having just one or two light-touch goals for each three-month period meant that I kept momentum and didn’t lose heart when the going got particularly tough.
If you could do one or two things in the next three months to help nudge your work-in-progress along, what would they be?
3. Conduct annual reviews
Thinking in years rather than months with your creative project can really help ease anxiety. Each January, I love using the Year Compass https://yearcompass.com/ a free downloadable resource, to help map my year ahead, and to take account of the year I’ve just completed. In previous years, I made sure I wrote down all the little wins – competition placings, magazine publications – and I kept a spreadsheet of these. This meant that when I came to submit to publishers, I had a comprehensive snapshot of where my work had previously been placed or appeared. It also motivated me to keep going as the years rolled by.
Ask yourself: what motivates you and how can you keep track of your writing aspirations over longer timespans?
4. Befriend your unique creative practice
Comparison is the thief of joy. On the back of publishing a commercial novel, I quit my job and spent another two years trying to write another book in the same genre, because that was what my peers were doing. I struggled. Reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic helped me to redefine what success looked like and I returned to the workplace, and also returned to my first love: writing poetry. While this genre doesn’t attract big advances, creatively I accumulated a wealth of knowledge which money could never have bought.
Befriend your unique way of creating new work. Relish in the fact that everyone’s creative path is completely unique. Which genre makes your heart sing?
5. Submit your work strategically
If you’ve completed your work-in-progress but you aren’t sure how to go about sending it out to the world, then this TLC blog includes a wealth of information on that topic. I devised a simple strategy for the submission process which meant that when I got a knock-back after the manuscript had sat on a publisher’s desk for over a year, I immediately had a plan for how to progress. Submitting your work is a test in tenacity, and if you think strategically and with a business mindset, then you’re less likely to have the wind knocked out of your sails if you get rejected.
Knowledge is power: what resources can you gather to better inform yourself on the submission process?
I hope this glimpse behind the scenes of a portfolio career author is a refreshing take on the realities of writing full-length projects over the long haul. Let us know in the comments below what’s kept you going when the months of drafting your manuscript have morphed into years…
Julia Forster is an author coach and writer’s retreat host at the Writers’ Cabin in Machynlleth, mid Wales https://writewithin.wales/writers-retreat/ A previous mentor and editor at TLC, she’s currently working on her next book as part of a PhD in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. It will probably take her many years to write. Her next collection, Invisible Sisterhood, will be published by Parthian Books in spring 2027, eleven years after she commenced writing it. https://www.parthianbooks.com/collections/pre-order/products/invisible-sisterhood
