…the heart…and the learned skills of the conscious mind… make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen.

Mary Oliver
A Poetry Handbook

Whether you are someone who sets out to write poems, essays, stories or articles or keeps journals, the thinking and analogy I make in this excerpt from my book A Day in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery, originally posted for Writing It Real members in 2007, will help you keep from withdrawing from writing because of the “I-just-can’t-find-the-time-to-write” syndrome. With the holiday season fast approaching, doing the assignments I am reposting this week will help you write your way toward freeing your writing self despite busy times (and aren’t all times busy?). Substitute the word “writer within” for “journal keeper within” and “writing” for “journal” if that suits you and hire that candidate immediately!

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Years ago when I was helping my husband start a computer networking training and consulting business, he and I attended a time management seminar put on by The Day-Timer company. Using an overhead projector, the presenter showed us someone’s system of keeping personal and job to-do lists in separate places. He then showed us what it would look like if the person just kept it all together in one book. He said we were wasting time and effort and making things complicated for ourselves when we tried to separate our lives according to what was for work and what was personal. If you meant to call a florist to send flowers to your wife for her birthday or you needed to make a doctor’s appointment, put it right in the book along with meetings to attend and memos to be written. It’s one life, your life, he told us.

As a writer and teacher of writing, I was used to hearing a variation on this theme of separating work and personal life. If I wasn’t saying this, someone I knew was saying it: “If only I didn’t have to work full time, then I could pay attention to my writing.” “If only I wasn’t raising toddlers (or school age kids or teenagers), then I’m sure I’d do more writing.” “If only I wasn’t the one who has to do all the record keeping and bill paying and busy work in our household, then I’d write more.” If only, if only, if only.

When the time management presenter told us about the time wastefulness of separating our lives this way, he certainly struck a chord with me. Hadn’t William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens worked as full time professionals and still written–a lot? I remembered a video series called Visions and Voices where an actor playing William Carlos Williams finishes a house call to a sick patient and enters his automobile, then sits behind the steering wheel and writes a poem on a handy prescription pad. I also remembered that Wallace Stevens walked to work every day as an insurance agent and on his way composed lines of poetry.

Up until this time management class, I had been a vacation-based writer, writing in accordance with the school calendar. Summer months were good writing months, and fall, winter and spring months were more difficult for me. But after the Day Timer talk, I wrote more during the months I worked in classrooms. I learned to clear space for myself and for my writing on that piled-up desk of mine. When I couldn’t manage to get the space I wanted, I learned to get it by driving a short distance away for an hour or less. I’d drive to a park or to a scenic viewing spot along Puget Sound or sometimes just to a different block and sit behind my own steering wheel and write pages in what I called my writer’s journal.

I soon realized I was not only interspersing hours of writing with hours of working and raising a family, but I was also changing my sensibility: It was as if I after hanging around that business presentation on time management, I had hired myself to do the work I really wanted done and I was getting somewhere.

Sometime later, I was creating exercises for a class on keeping a writer’s journal. Most of the class had introduced themselves as people who weren’t disciplined and couldn’t find enough time to write and so were taking the class hoping it would help them get disciplined. I worked on an exercise that I thought would help these students build a commitment to interspersing writing in their daily lives as I had.

I didn’t say, “Write it in your Day Timer and keep the appointments with yourself,” partly because I needed in-class writing prompts for everyone. I decided to extend a business metaphor and came up with the following idea: going through the process in writing of hiring oneself to keep a writer’s journal. The exercise inspired some whimsical ways of approaching such employment, some entertaining ideas about what a journal keeper does and how and when she does it, as well as guidelines for keeping a commitment to writing. I think you’ll enjoy doing this exercise. I know it will help you build confidence in yourself as the right person for your writing job.

Creating a Job Description that Works

When you have a position to be filled and no one there to fill it, you must engage in a hiring process. The first step to building an effective process is to write a job description that encapsulates the responsibilities, duties, and functions of the person who will be hired. This is your chance to fully imagine the job you want done and to propose which skills the person you’d hire would have.

Across the top of a page write the title, “Position: Journal Keeper. ” For the next 10 minutes let yourself describe this job. What would the person you hire be called upon to do in this journal keeper position? What would you expect the functions of such a person to include? What skills would such an applicant need to convince you he or she had? Remember, though, this is not just any journal keeper. This is YOUR Journal Keeper you are talking about. This person might have to be able to write on the fly or be especially able to pick up mid-sentence with something he or she was writing a week ago. The job description depends upon what your life is like and what you need from the journal keeper. If you are hoping that the very existence in your life of this journal keeper will change the job into something more serene than it might be now, say this and describe what you are hoping for.

Since the job description you write doesn’t need to show up in a want ad that costs by the word, take another ten or twenty minutes and write some anecdotal accounts of how you have come to know these are the functions, duties, and skills required for the job of being your journal keeper. You didn’t pull these notions out of thin air. They were born of your experience, wishes and dreams. Write that down!

The Candidates’ Credentials

Resume
You are the person out there who can fulfill the job you have created. It might be fun to write YOUR resume as such a candidate. The categories in the resume can be different than in a normal resume. Just call them Life Skills, Special Interests and Hobbies, Organization Memberships (families are organizations), and Goals for the Future. Here is your chance to find in your life experiences the activities and desires, the skills and abilities that qualify you to be a journal keeper. You might want to include personal and professional references at the end. These would be the names of people, real or fictional, dead or alive, that you feel would be the right people to back up you up on your ability to take on the job of journal keeper.

Letter of Introduction
A resume is most often submitted with a letter of introduction. Now it is time to write that letter. Look over the resume you have created and let the person this resume represents speak in a natural but persuasive voice about why he or she is right for the job. The candidate may even be so bold as to add a few ideas of his or her own.

Interviewing the Candidate

It is often overwhelming to meet and interview candidates for a job and it is usually quite overwhelming to be the candidate having the interview.

The interviewer wonders, “Did you make the impression I was a skillful manager? Did I ask the right questions for really learning about the prospective employee? Did I describe the job and its duties accurately enough that the candidate really knows what I am looking for?

The candidate wonders, “Did I dress appropriately? Did I mumble or did I project my voice confidently? Did I seem intelligent and like I understood the job and what it requires? Did I seem like someone who could both take directions and work independently as a self-starter? Did I ask the kind of questions bosses like to hear, the ones that show I am thoughtful but focused?

You get to have fun here. Write a dialog between you the hiring agent and you the job applicant. You can do this all in dialogue or in addition you can write inner thoughts and asides on both characters’ parts. Be sure the dialog and the inner thoughts take in some of the surroundings or current themes about job hunting.

On one episode of ER, Carrie Weaver, head resident in the Emergency Room is interviewing for a head doctor position. A warm-hearted but inappropriate clerk on the floor says of Carrie’s outfit, “Oh, you read that magazine article, too, the one about what to wear when you are interviewing for the important position.” This is the kind of thing you can write into your dialog. The interviewer might comment on the applicant’s attire or either party might have thoughts about the other’s or her own clothing. Either party might comment on the surroundings where they are interviewing or the place where the job is assigned. Let yourself have fun putting two human beings in this conversation that is actually wholly off the record.

Designate a Start Date and Place of Employment

Now it is time to pretend that you are talking to your new employee over the phone or writing a letter or an email to her making the offer of employment. If you have any reservations at this time or areas of concern you want your new employee to know you will be watching and evaluating, go ahead and get these off your chest in this conversation or message. When you have written this exchange or correspondence, end it by stating the start date, the start time, and the place your new hire is to report. Be sure to tell the employee how many times per week you expect her to write in the journal, one or more days a week. You will need to also tell her where and when during the week you expect her to report to work. Are her hours and the location she works from flexible or more structured? Be sure she understands how to use the journal you have created and want kept! Write this all down in your journal.

You have worked hard to envision this job well and to conjure the journal keeper you have hired.

Now it’s the journal keeper’s turn to get to work. Make sure her hours appear in your date book right alongside your children’s doctor’s appointments, your errands, and the work and volunteer meetings you must attend, no matter if she is supposed to do her job in the parking lot before she enters a building or for an hour each Saturday morning parked by a beach.