This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 9: Say Yes To Writing.

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Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner, and I have a new microphone you guys. Can you tell? Maybe you can’t. I don’t know, but I like it, I can tell. I had been using a microphone that I had borrowed from work, a Blue Snowball, and I decided, you know what, Sarah, you’re committing to doing this podcast, you are just going to make the investment and get your own mic. And so I did. So I am speaking to you today from a blue Yeti mic, and I kind of love it. I had received some constructive criticism as to the volume and listenability of my podcast. And so hopefully this will help begin to fix those issues. Thank you so much for bringing them to my attention. I honestly really do appreciate it. Okay. Enough geeking out about the microphone.

So this has been a week of highs and lows and really nothing else in between. We’ll talk about the lows in just a second, but as for the highs I want to thank you especially, and I want to thank you because I received so many kind and lovely emails from listeners this week. I received a very interesting question, which I will share with you a little bit later today. And I also just received this really cool email that made me smile from a listener whose maiden name was Sarah Zerner, which, that was awesome. So thank you. I love reaching out and connecting with people and emails are a great start to building a community of writers, which is where I’d really like this to go.

So the Write Now podcast is not merely writing tips and tricks. I’m also using it to take a look at work, life balance, and how we can sort of wedge our passion project, our writing into that mix. And in my week of highs and lows and absolutely no mediums, no happy mediums to balance it out, I thought a lot about balance and how I had none of it. And I thought that maybe this was something that you also struggled with. Even if you are a full time writer, there are still demands on your time from people asking you to write and review resumes and cover letters, to a volunteer association that knows you’re a good writer asking you to please write/proofread/whatever a newsletter or an article or a brochure or a webpage. If you’re a teacher, you might have students asking you to write letters of recommendation, or to direct the play after school or to judge a competition. The list, as they say, goes on.

I really believe that in order to kind of establish a common experience or to really connect with people, it’s a really good idea to share moments of vulnerability, so I’m going to share with you my low for the week. And that was on Friday morning. I was sitting at my desk at work. I had been up for several hours. I had not slept well the night before. I had had an uncomfortable conversation with a coworker that I couldn’t get out of my head. I had been to an hour of meetings before work, and I knew that I had several hours worth of meetings at multiple venues after work and something inside of me just snaps like a dry little twig. And it broke easily because it was dry and sad and thin. And I cried at my desk. I went through the remainder of the box of Kleenex that was at my desk and I couldn’t stop crying.

And maybe this is indicative of other issues in my life, but I just couldn’t stop. And I’m not generally an incredibly emotional person. So it was a little scary that I didn’t have control over myself and my emotions at work. I try to be really conscious of that as a woman in the workplace. I try not to break down and show that I’m weak. But I was weak because I had weakened myself, not consciously and not purposefully, but I knew I had done this to myself. I made the conscious decision maybe about a year ago now that I was going to live my life for others, that I was going to dedicate my life to making the world better and to helping people and even to making people smile or feel like their lives are worthwhile. I decided that I wanted to do that, but I don’t think I did it correctly.

When I made that decision, I decided that I was going to be selfless. And so I began to say yes, indiscriminately to everyone. Sarah, will you serve on this board? Of course I will. I would love to help you with that. Sarah, will you mentor my daughter? Of course, I would love to mentor her and help her with her homework. Sarah, will you edit my novel? I would love to edit your novel, of course. Just send me a copy. Sarah, will you serve as church president? I would be honored. Now I’m definitely not saying that helping others is bad because it’s not. But I have learned one very valuable lesson from overextending myself. And that is when I say yes to a board, to a meeting, even to lunch with an acquaintance or drinks after work with a potential client, then I say no to writing.

I think a lot of us grew up being told that you can do anything, you can be anything. Do you want to be an astronaut? Go be an astronaut. Do you want to be a doctor? Study hard, go to med school, be a doctor. It was all very empowering. And I made the mistake as a young impressionable child and then as a naive impressionable adult of taking that to heart, except I think I misinterpreted it because when they said you can be anything, what I heard was you can be everything. And as much as I live for hope and a better future and all of that good, lovely, far away stuff, I realized that I do have limitations and you have limitations. And our real job in life is to learn how to work and succeed within those limitations.

In the long laundry list of things that I can’t say no to, I joined a sort of women’s coffee hour. It’s kind of like a book club in the mornings before work once a week. And one of the books that we read was called The Best Yes by Lisa TerKeurst. Fair warning for any of you who would like to check this book out, it is a Christian book. And so you can take that or leave that as you see fit. But there was a passage in that book and when I read it, I put the book down and I realized that all of the right choices that I thought I had made were not really all that right.

Here’s the passage I read, from Lisa TerKeurst’s The Best Yes, “Here’s the reality of our current situation. Other people’s requests dictate the decisions we make. We become slaves to other’s demands when we let our time become dictated by requests, we will live reactive lives instead of proactive and reactive lives get very exhausting very quickly. We get requests. We fill up our schedules all the way to the limit. We leave very little white space. We live lives that exhaust us. We never change our approach. Therefore we never experience the thrill of deep soul satisfaction.”

I want stress that I am not a person who tends to read self help books. I mean, I love all books of all kinds, but I read generally as a form of escape. And so self help books really just put me right back in to where I’m trying to escape from. And so for me, I am a writer and perhaps you’ve said that too, I am a writer. And what gives us that deep soul satisfaction? What makes us realize that we’re living the lives we were meant to lead is when we are writing. And I took a look at my schedule because I’ve had to become very organized in the past couple of years as I started to take on more and more responsibilities, I actually keep a schedule now, which if you knew me is yeah, not me really.

But I looked at the time that I had blocked off for all of my appointments and meetings. And I realized it has been weeks since I have written what I want to be writing, which means that it has been weeks since I have satisfied that creative thirst in my soul. Like not to get all flowery and whatever, but really it’s true. And I think that you know what feeling I’m talking about. And so I find myself torn. Torn between living a life for others, which I feel is good and noble and something that I should do, and living my life for myself. Because when I sit down to write, I feel selfish. I feel like I could be using that time to volunteer somewhere, better myself, take a class. But really when I’m doing that, when I’m saying yes to meetings and lunches with strangers, when I prioritize everything, literally everything over the thing that I was put on this earth to do, now that just sounds like I’m hiding. That just sounds like I’m escaping. That just sounds like I am wasting my talent.

I spoke a bit about this in episode one, what’s keeping you from writing? And I talked about fear and doubt and some other lovely things. So let’s go back briefly to this awkward and uncomfortable breakdown I had at my desk. What triggered it? Was it exhaustion? Was it stress? Well maybe yes, actually, probably that contributed to it. But I knew that I had been giving myself and giving myself and giving myself to all of these different commitments and responsibilities and the more and more that I was living for other people, the less and less that I felt fulfilled. Part of it is I’m an introvert. And I simply wasn’t giving myself enough/any time to recharge between commitments. Part of it however, was that deep down inside, I’m a people pleaser.

And I realized that part of the reason that I was saying yes to all of these things was so that I could make people happy, but you can never make everyone happy. Just as I said, in episode seven, you can never do enough. And it’s that word, enough. You can’t be everything. You can be anything you want to be, but you cannot be everything. And I realized that when I started getting disappointed reactions from people. I was over committed, and so I would rush from meeting to meeting and I would be 10 minutes late to each one and I’d get looks from people like they were disappointed in me. And I kind of wanted to say, Hey, I am trying my best here. I am doing everything that I possibly can, but I was slowly learning that sometimes you need to say no to some things to commit yourself fully to other things.

The reason that I started crying at work was because finally someone had given voice to the doubts I had felt in myself for months now. They said, not in these exact words, but essentially, you’re not doing enough. To which I almost kind of laughed. And I was like, you know what? I’m doing too much. This is ridiculous. You don’t even know what I’m doing outside of this role. You have no idea how many things I belong to and how many sacrifices I make. Oh, I got so self-righteous and I got self-righteous because I didn’t want to admit that the problem was myself, that I had overbooked myself in my desperation to please others, that I was in fact, letting them down by not being able to fully commit to what they wanted and expected of me, that I was not committing at all to what I wanted and expected from myself.

But being told that you’re not enough. It hurts. You’re not good enough. You’re not fast enough. You’re not making enough healthy dinners for your family. You’re not volunteering enough at church or at an organization you belong to. You’re not exercising enough. You’re not spending enough time with your family. We can never do enough when we let other people set the expectation and we can never do enough when we set false expectations for ourselves. And that’s what I had been doing. Setting false expectations, leading people into thinking that I could do everything.

So what I did was I broke down my schedule. I said, okay, there’s 24 hours in a day, eight of those hours I need to spend sleeping because I am an old lady and I get cranky if I don’t get full night’s sleep. So, okay. That’s eight hours taken care of. I have 16 hours remaining in the day. My next daily commitment that I can’t get out of is going to work. Okay. So 10 hours for work because half hour to drive there, eight hours to work, an hour lunch break, and a half hour to drive home. Okay. So we’re up to 18 hours total. Usually every day I have coffee before work with a coworker or a friend or an acquaintance. And so that’s one hour. I usually have two hours of meetings after work. I have one hour of dinner preparation and eating with my family. I have a half hour of exercise that I’m supposed to wedge into every day. Half hour of showering in the morning and getting ready.

When you add up that list of commitments, I just read off, that’s 23 hours a day. And so when I look at my time, I have one hour per day in which to read or write or watch an episode of Orphan Black or work outside in my garden, or hang out with my husband, or play video games. I’ve been playing Mass Effect 2 for like four years and I’ve not finished it yet. So I have one hour a day to myself in which I can write. And when I say that every writer must read, I’m not kidding.

And so we’ll say a half hour reading and a half hour writing. It’s hard to sit down and write for just a half hour a day. It’s hard to sit down and write for any amount of time every day, but I didn’t feel like that was enough, you see what I did there, or fair to my craft. I had to realize that I am a finite person with finite resources. And instead of saying yes to everything and living my life for others, maybe it was an okay thing to say yes to my writing and yes to refreshing myself and yes to limiting my volunteer time so that I could fully commit myself to the events that I did commit to so that I could show up on time, so that I could write well and passionately and perhaps even create a work that would help far more people than the hour that I would spend with a disinterested teenager who just wanted me to go away.

I’m not saying that time isn’t valuable. What I am saying is that your time is limited. And to read another excerpt from Lisa TerKeurst’s book, “Not every responsibility can be your responsibility.” I realized that I had been saying yes to things that I was not particularly equipped to say yes to, or to do, or to carry out responsibly and well. I said, what am I good at? I’m good at writing. So there is a play coming up and I have agreed to be this dancer role. That was not an intelligent thing to say yes to. There are so many people who could do this better than I can. And I’m actually embarrassed because I did not say no to this. My husband said no. He called up the person who had asked me and said, please find someone else. Sarah is not a dancer, which is certainly true. I love to dance, but I have absolutely zero training. You do not want me dancing in front of people.

So I’d encourage you to list out your daily obligations. If you find something that is not perfectly suited to you, that maybe somebody else could do much better, much more efficiently, maybe let them know about it. Maybe say no, maybe stop. Because you can only say yes to writing sometimes when you say no to other things that take up your writing time. So what am I giving up? It’s hard to give stuff up because essentially we’re admitting that we can’t handle something or that we’re failing and nobody likes to look weak. But do it, let that be a sacrifice for your art. Let that be a sacrifice so that you can write and live out your purpose. I’m speaking as much to myself here as to anyone else.

So next week I am limiting myself to two pre-work coffee meetings. I will go to work. I will try to write or make notes over my lunch. I’m going to quit some of the committees that I’m on. Committees that could be better served by other people who are more passionate about the subject, and who can show up on time because every responsibility is not my responsibility. If I’m going to be myself and I don’t want to sound like a new agey, narcissist selfie generation, me, me, me. But there’s a difference between being selfish and actually living a healthy and balanced life and doing what’s best for not only you, but for the people whose lives you are responsible for helping. If you do not have time to grow and mature personally, and to develop your writing skills and to read every day, you’re not doing anyone any favors, least of all yourself.

It just really reminds me of this quote from Stephen King in his book on writing, which I have referenced before and will continue to reference in the future. But he says, “If God gives you something you can do. Why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?” So please, play to your strengths, use your talents. You can’t do everything, but you can do anything. And if what you want to do is become a writer and of what you want to do is write and to be a writer, then do it. Because you are enough. My writing mentor realized that I have not been feeling like enough lately. And she sent me this text that I’m going to read. And I hope it’s okay with her that I’m reading this to you, but it really helped me. So pretend that she texted this to you because it applies to you.

She says, “Hey you. Do you know how capable you are? Totally capable. And do you know that doesn’t mean you have to do all of the things? You totally don’t have to. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Take care of yourself and remember the simple gift of your breath. It will serve you well. You are loved and worthy and amazing. And gosh, I am so glad we’re friends.” So you can still live your life for others just in the way that you are gifted to live your life for others. And to live for others, you have to live a little bit for yourself first.

So I have a question this week, we’ve gone a few weeks without questions, but I have a question this week from someone who would prefer to remain anonymous, which is absolutely fine. And this person says, “My question is this. You have said several times that writers should read every day. And I can’t agree more. I’ve urged my boyfriend to do this, but he says that he wants to spend his spare time writing and not reading. I on the other hand, spend much time reading and admittedly, no time writing outside of my day job. I know I need more balance, but I feel like this perspective on reading is holding him back. He gets defensive if I mention it. How should I approach this? Thanks. Anonymous.”

That is an excellent question. And coincidentally, it ties in very well with our talk today about balance and prioritizing. So I’d like to answer this in two parts. The first part is that I’ve been in relationships before where you always want to say, hey, if you do this, everything will be better. And while it may be true, the other person is often not super receptive and that can be frustrating for both of you. He might just be one of those people that needs to figure things out for himself or come to the conclusion himself, because unfortunately we often take the advice of those very, very close and dear to us for granted. And so the question is, if he thinks that reading is important for his writing? If he thinks it’s important, but simply doesn’t have time for it and he only has, like me, one spare hour a day in which to write, maybe it’s time to start looking at the other things in his life that maybe he could say no to, to make more time for reading and writing.

On the other hand, if he is a writer who doesn’t believe that reading is important, luckily there are people much smarter than I, who will say much more eloquently than I, that reading is essential for any writer and not just because it can help improve your vocabulary and your sense of flow and your style. But depending on what he’s writing, if he’s writing science fiction or fantasy, he may be writing something that has already been written. I do that all the time. I like invent something and I’m like, Oh my gosh, I should like patent this. And then somebody’s like, Sarah, somebody has already made that and patented it and it’s for sale right here.

So it’s really good to keep abreast of what other writers are writing. And also he might just need to come to that conclusion himself through, I don’t necessarily want to say tough love or a hard lesson, but as much as this might hurt to hear, and as much as you want to do it, it’s not your responsibility to make him a better writer. One day, if he decides that he wants to become a better writer and he starts looking for ways in which to improve his writing, reading is one of the most obvious and accessible ways to do that. But it might simply be that he needs to come to that conclusion himself.

Now, the second part of that question regarding you writing for a living, and when you come home, you do a lot of reading because you don’t really have time to read and write, or perhaps you’re just creatively zapped or burnt out. I advise you to listen to episode eight of this podcast, how to write when you don’t feel like writing. Or if it is more a question of balance, then see what else in your life is taking up your time. You probably can’t quit your day job because very few of us can do that. But if there’s something else that you’re not truly passionate about, that you can say no to, that will allow you to say yes to writing, then do that. And let me know if that helps.

Otherwise, there’s ways you can juggle your schedule so that you only read every other day and you write every other day. And if that’s what you need to do for a season or two, then that’s fine. But I love that you’re asking this question because it means that you’re not giving up and you’ve realized that writing and reading are both important to you. And that is awesome. So don’t let go of that. I wish you the absolute best of luck. And if you have more questions, please feel free to email me.

You can reach me at hello at sarahwerner dot com, S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Or you can fill out the little contact form on my website. Speaking of my website, I have removed the contribute page. You can still donate to me on Patreon if you like, but I kind of want to think bigger. And I want to think about what I can provide for you that would actually be valuable to you instead of saying, hey, help me cover podcasting costs, thanks. So more to come on that.

If you would like to receive random periodic intermittent whatever emails from me, you can sign up on my website to be in my email mailing list, and I will send you interesting things and no spam, I promise. It’s just a great way for us to stay in touch between podcasts. Also, I am on Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Tumblr/ all of your favorite social media outlets. You can find links to those on my website. So have fun I guess. Again, this week’s book of the week was The Best Yes by Lisa TerKeurst, which you will find linked in the show notes for this episode.

And until next time, this has been the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner. And I want you to remember that you are enough. Thanks for listening.

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