"Where does the time go?"
And the answer is you have the same 24 hours you always have... but chances are good that either you didn't have as much time to make art, or the art you're making now is taking a lot more time than the art you were making way back when.
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| These are the only two answers to the question. |
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What Else Did You Do This Year?
Let's address the first answer to the question, because this is the one that is honestly a much more common situation.
Review your past year, and ask yourself what else you had to do that stopped you from getting your writing done. Did you have to pick up more hours for work, or get a new job entirely? Did you have a child, or have to take on additional duties at home? Did you start a new fitness routine that ate up an hour or two a day you were previously using to write with? Did you get sick, have to start a commute to work when you were previously a remote employee, or go back to school?
You only have 24 hours in a day, and if something demands more time, then you have less time for your work. It's basic math.
Alternatively... your art might be taking more time now than it used to.
Consider the above video. This is something I made 3 months ago talking about my RPG Army Men: A Game of Tactical Plastic. And while the setup I had for it wasn't bad, precisely, it was pretty basic. Because of this, the editing process for this video only took about 15 minutes, and that's including the watch time to make sure everything I filmed showed up the way I wanted it to.
However, compare that to something I made 3 weeks ago.
This video took me 3 hours to edit. The obvious reason is because there's a lot more going on in it (thanks in large part due to the new editing software I acquired), and the whole point is to give the viewer something to watch to go along with my narration.
However, it's not just that it takes me more time and energy to make these videos. It's also that I now have an additional two hours and forty-five minutes that I would otherwise have used to work on other projects like blog entries, RPG supplements, short stories, novels, etc. And given that I make one of these videos every week, that's a lot of extra hours that get used up when you add them all together... especially because some videos are more complicated and time intensive than this one!
So while I am keeping my video releases on-schedule, that means I'm using time that was previously allocated to other things to make that happen. So whether it's my fiction projects that take a back seat, or a blog entry that doesn't always get done on time, or only getting 1 TTRPG supplement instead of 2 turned in by the end of the month, I didn't lose that time; I allocated it differently because I made a change to something I'm creating.
Chances Are You Aren't Lazy
At the end of the day, both the answers I gave are technically the same. You only have 24 hours in a day, and only so many of those hours are going to be usable for you to get work done. So unless you have the time available, and you also have the energy available, but you choose not to actually create more art you probably shouldn't call yourself lazy.
Now, this might be cold comfort, but it is important to examine your life with a critical eye before you insist that you are solely responsible for what you have (or haven't) accomplished with your days. Because only by taking stock can you understand where your time and energy are going before you make changes. Be kind to yourself, and make sure you have realistic expectations when it comes to your output this year.
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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!
That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!
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