Balancing Act

Balance.  That's the trick in any writer's life--how do I balance the need and urge to write and attempt to have some sort of career, with the rest of life?  Now that I've begun farming, that balancing act has gotten a little trickier.  In some ways, adding farming to my life makes sense precisely because it provides a counterpoint to hours spent at a desk staring at a computer screen, or in a dark theatre at rehearsal.  Most of my farming time is spent outside, engaged in physical labor, all while solving some very specific physical puzzles--how do I grow the most vegetables possible, in a specific plot of land, in the amount of time afforded by daylight and my energy and budget.  And even more important, it helps me more fully experience the world and meet new people (so I have more to write about).

But in adding this new avocation to my life, the question arose--would it crowd out writing and theatre?  In my ideal life, I would love to spend half of my year on farming and half of it writing.  Theoretically, farming has the potential to work this way, as long as I decide not to extend my growing season with greenhouses and other techniques.  I can get crops in the ground in April and stop farming in October, and spend the rest of the time on art.

This arrangement is not likely to pay a living wage.  Of course, neither writing plays or farming full time is likely to make that happen.  Theoretically splitting my time between writing and farming will slow my writing career.  I might write less and get less of my work published and produced.  That's a tradeoff I'd have to consciously choose, much as I knew that becoming a father would make me write less, but also lead to a more fulfilling life (I'm glad I made the choice I did).

I'm a numbers guy, as many of you know.  For a while, I've been trying to track the time I spend writing and marketing my work.  This year, I tracked my time even more closely than ever, trying to understand how this writing/farming split might work.  As the end of the year nears, here's how I've spent my time:

Writing (actual writing and research):  386 hours  (my goal was 400.  Just missed it!)

Rehearsals, Meetings & Productions of my work:  274 hours

Marketing (including submissions, networking, admin, blogging):  231 hours


For an entire writing career time of about 891 hours.



And for farming (including field work, planning, marketing, classes, etc.):  734 hours

Driving to our farm (which is about 45-60 minutes from home):  191 hours


For writing I did not track commuting time (but perhaps I should), but I went to about 100 meetings, mostly in town, and that would still add up to another 100 hours, by bike, T, and car.


So if I were to include commuting and travel time, I spent about 1,000 hours on my writing stuff, and about 925 on farming.  (All of these are under-reported a bit, especially marketing, e-mail, and web time.)

Oddly enough, last year, when I tracked actual writing time and rehearsal time together, I spent about 600 hours on both, and an additional 217 hours on marketing.   That means that this year, even though I added farming to the mix, I actually ended up writing a little bit more than I did before.  Which gets back to the old addage of, "if you want something done, ask a busy person."  Sometimes, if you want to do more, you just need to do more.  Obviously, there are a limited number of hours in the day, so I did cut things out, and I had a lot of help and forbearance from my family. 

The good news is that looking at these numbers makes me feel like I actually have a chance at finding this writing farm/balance that I'm searching for.  In 2013, I'll be farming twice as much land, but am hoping not to spend much more time doing it (I'm getting faster at doing stuff as I gain skills).

Do any of you track your writing time?  If so, how many hours to you spend actually writing?  Do you have time goals for the week, month, year?  I hope you'll comment and share.

Seeds, Seedlings, and Auditions

This weekend we placed our seed and seedling orders for the Pen and Pepper Farm.  It took hours of going over the spreadsheets for each crop, trying to make sure we had the right amounts, researching different varieties, comparing prices and availability in different catalogs.  But finally we had it all figured out and committed.

Now we're at the moment of maximum potential.  Though we know what vegetables and varieties we'll be growing, it's all still theoretical.  We don't have anything in the ground yet.  Heck, we haven't even seen the ground yet--we don't get our incubator plot assignments until late March.  But the farm is fully populated in our imaginations now, rows of kale and lettuce and beans in the sun.  Overflowing baskets of peppers and tomatoes fill our tables at the farmer's markets.

It feels like we've just completed auditions for a play.  The roles are all cast, and in our minds we can jump ahead to visualize the final production, with everyone perfectly in character, on the ideal and as-yet-unbuilt set, in front of packed houses.  No messy compromises on the script have happened yet, no struggling through rough patches in rehearsal, no small houses on rainy Thursday nights.  Everything can still go right.  And it might.  It might turn out even better than I imagine.

In the production of play, or in the creation of a garden or farm, this is a moment that doesn't last long.  The process of turning it all into reality will come, and get messy and fun and hard, and I wouldn't miss any of it.  But this moment of gleaming optimistic potential is one worth savoring.

farming? (why and how)

I spend a lot of my time writing books and plays and am involved with a dozen different theatre and film projects.  But I've also been a pretty serious gardener for a while.  I used to coordinate two different community gardens in Roxbury.  I started the 200 Foot Garden public garden in Brookline three years ago.  Last summer, we grew in three different gardens.

Now I'm taking the next step.  This year, I'll be in a farm training program, the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, and farming a quarter acre incubator plot in Dracut, MA.  The incubator plots come with irrigation, a shared hoophouse and tractor, tools, lots of technical support, and the ability to sell to the World PEAS cooperative CSA.  We'll also be selling our produce at two farmer's markets over the summer and fall, under the name of Puddingstone Farm.

This means I'm going to writing less from April through October, which is not a small thing for me.  When the kids were little, I was always scrambling to find more time to write and do theatre.  Now they're a lot bigger, and I'm committing to a huge project that's going to eat writing time like never before.

Why?

For the most part, it's for the positive things that appeal to me about farming:

• I like to work with my hands.
• I like to be outdoors, growing things.
• I believe that growing healthy food is important, not just for my family, but also for my community as a whole.  Bringing backs sustainable small farms is important for the health of the environment.
• I like developing the ability to feed myself.
• I look forward to meeting and interacting with new people at the farmer's markets.  At our stand, we plan to have a small lending library of our favorite cookbooks and books about farming and food.  Mostly to serve as a jumping off point for interesting conversations.
• I enjoy getting to know other farmers.  I know a lot of theatre and book folk, but it's good to widen my circle.  The people I see at the NOFA conference talk about different things from people at theatre conferences.  That's a good thing for me as a writer, and as a person.
• It's hard.  I like to do hard things.  (Hence writing plays and novels.)  The mental part is just as challenging as the physical.
• There's a certain concreteness to it.  I plant a seed and it germinates.  I take proper care of the seedling and it turns into a plant that I can harvest.  There's a simple, natural logic to it.
• People know that they need to pay for food.  They may not understand that they should pay what it really costs.  (Which might make it similar to working in theatre or writing books.)  It's very hard to make a living as a farmer, and I'm not even planning to attempt to make that much money.  But I will be one of the few people entering farming who will see it as a pay increase over what I've been doing.
• The New Entry program really fits into my style of learning.  I like to be independent and am not afraid to make mistakes and fail.  

There are also a few things about writing that have been dragging me down, which makes it palatable for me to trade in some writing time for farming time.

• The book business makes less and less sense to me.  I don't intend to stop writing books (I'm deep in revisions for a novel right now), but I'm not sure publishers have a good plan for the future.  And I'm not sure where the kind of work I write fits into the system.  There used to be a place for mid-list writers.  I'm not sure where that is anymore.  Self-publishing ebooks is okay, but the amount of promo time required is onerous, and even then, there's a fair bit of luck involved to sell many copies (especially if you're not writing genre fiction). 
• I'm finding it increasingly difficult to find productions of full-length plays in the current theatre climate.  Part of the reason is that there are more playwrights (there's been an explosion of graduate writing programs over the past 20 years) and fewer slots for full-length productions.  I've had a lot of readings over the past few years, some great development opportunities, and my short work gets performed a lot.  But I'm still trying to get my head around the state of modern theatre and new plays and where I fit in.  I'm going to keep writing new full-length plays (I can't help myself), but if they don't end up on stage, professionally produced, I'm going to keep bumping into limits as to how much I can grow as a writer.  
• Money in theatre and fiction writing feels like it's drying up.  I'm not in it for the money, but I also wouldn't mind making a little more than I spend.  My writing just barely does that, in a good year.  Farming isn't likely to be much better, I realize, but I can at least make some good guesses in a spreadsheet and find a scenario that has a positive return.  As Kira enters college (in a year and a half), we'll see how any long I can keep up any of these endeavors.

I'm fully aware that I'm in my mid-forties and am reaching that age when people have their mid-life crises and dream about big changes.  About life on the farm.  Hell, lots of people dream about life as a writer.  I'm not giving up the writing life, but I am branching out and learning some new skills and mixing things up a bit.

Because of the commuting required to the incubator site, this particular farming project is likely to only last a year.  But if it goes well, I will look to farm elsewhere next season (closer to home).

Writing and farming both appeal to me for some basic reasons:  I like to create things, and I like interacting with people.  What mix of growing food and writing stories ends up meeting those needs remains to be seen.  I'm tempted to change the name of this blog to The Writing and Farming Life (x3), because whatever happens, it's going to remain a mix.

I'm excited to see how this ends up affecting what I write about.  This will be year with a lot of new experiences.  I'm sure I'll find the seeds for a few new plays and books in there, somewhere.

(The 200 Foot Garden from last year)