Preventing Post-Holiday Writer’s Guilt

Don’t panic, but there are only six days until Christmas arrives and only 12 days until the year ends. Holidays are approaching fast, and I realized I still haven’t achieved everything I wanted to this year. Now, I am worried about all the things I won’t get done over the holidays. 

Instead of stressing about the post-holiday writer’s guilt already, I decided to take a deep breath and plan to keep writing a couple of hours each day despite all the festive Christmas parties littering my calendar with work, family, and friends. My holidays will be packed full, but I have ten days off, and it would be great to make some progress on a writing project or two. Therefore, I need to figure out how to juggle the schedule to make sufficient time for work, family, exercise, writing, and a little bit of sleep.

Connecting with family and friends at this time of year is important, and fitting in the job stuff is required to pay all the bills, which is why making room for writing feels difficult and complicated.

So, if you are reading this and would like to prevent the post-holiday writer’s guilt, then check out my suggestions to help us achieve our writing goals together. 

Re-evaluate Your Writing Goals: As we approach the holidays, write down your goals in a notebook or add them to a Word document on your computer. Doing this will keep you organized and keep you motivated to achieve them. This can include goals such as finishing a short story, synopsis, or novel.

Make a List of Your Commitments Outside of Writing: This list should include anything happening over the holidays, such as Christmas parties, cookie exchanges, church services, company visits, traveling days to meet and hug the grandparents, etc.

Once you figure out your writing goals and outside commitments, it will give you a realistic perspective of how much time you will have left. It will also allow you to understand what you could achieve between entertaining your company, eating meals, opening presents, and sleeping. There won’t be much free time, so planning ahead might work for you.

Examples: 

• While waiting for the Pumpkin pies to come out of the oven, you could take those thirty minutes to research the next Literary Agent you would like to query. Add the name and agency to your spreadsheet and jot down some notes about why you want to query that person. 
• Or, you could spend thirty minutes writing a new poem, editing your query letter, or writing a few new novel ideas in your notebook. 
• Or, you could plan a week or three in 2023 for your escapes to a writing retreat somewhere.

Thirty minutes of doing some of these activities might be less time spent on finishing your novel, but it is still time well spent doing other “writerly” things. This is considered an achievement and a goal you can check off your list. There will be no writer’s guilt later if you can fit in something during the pie-baking process now.

If all else fails, take a walk outside in the woods and kick some snow around. Let your mind wander to the story you are writing and see what happens. Try not to think about the solo time as if you are selfish because writing time is sacred. It is like a job you will eventually get paid for, right? So, we need to stop feeling guilty about prioritizing our writing time, and think about it more as a business or a second job.

Keep dreaming BIG, working hard, and it will eventually happen for you. Just breathe. Chug coffee. Be merry with your people whenever the mood strikes you, but squeeze in some happy writing time—whether it is at 5 AM (when everyone else is still sleeping) or midnight (when everyone is heavy into an aggressive family Domino game with drinking and swearing). If you take time to squeeze it in, there will be no writer’s guilt come the first of January.

Good Luck and Happy GUILT-FREE Holidays!