This Is What You Need to Be Doing Right Now

How to prioritize the many obligations of a writing career

I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently from writing friends about priorities. There are so many things that we’re told to do as writers—draft new stuff, revise old stuff, submit stuff, promote stuff, apply to stuff, build a platform, go to events, read stuff, make writing friends, befriend important people—that it can be paralyzing to sit down at your writing desk (or kitchen counter, or bathroom floor) and decide where to start. Is it more important to finish your novel-in-progress, or to submit short stories? Is it more important to apply to this writing residency before the deadline, or to go to tonight’s book launch event where you might meet someone interesting?

Before I get into my method for deciding between competing priorities—yes, I have a method!—I’ll start with a list of common writerly tasks, assuming that you write fiction or something close to it:

• draft new stories

• edit old stories

• submit stories to journals

• pitch essays/reviews/criticism

• work on a long-form project, e.g. novel

• query agents

• research comp titles & competitive titles

• apply to residencies/conferences/grants

• create & update a website

• post on social media

• attend book events

• read recent publications

• network with other writers

This is a totally overwhelming list of things that you should theoretically be doing at all times. If you look at this list first thing in the morning, you will short-circuit for the rest of the day.

I have worked out (sort of accidentally) a method to narrow this list down to the best task for me to work on at any given time. I’m hoping the method might work for you too, or at least give you a new way to think about sorting through competing priorities.

The trick is to follow two golden rules:

Rule 1: Figure out what kind of energy you have, right now, at this moment.

Sometimes, I am full of inspiration, pacing around the kitchen and scribbling incoherent little notes and typing out sentences at top speed. We’re going to call this Creative Energy.

Sometimes, I find myself curiously disciplined and happy to sit down and work on the same project for hours plural in a state of pleasant detachment. I’m not fizzing with excitement, and I’m also not dragging myself through the work. I’m just sort of absently engaged. We’ll call this Workhorse Energy.

And sometimes, I am completely unable to string two thoughts together, but still want to work on my writing, but can’t work on my writing because I am an anxious zombie. We’re going to (euphemistically) call this one Administrative Energy.

Your modes may differ from mine, and probably your terms will differ too, but hopefully you know what I mean—sometimes the creative brain is there, and sometimes it just isn’t.

My belief is that all the writerly tasks listed above are better suited to certain kinds of energy than others. Let’s sort those out now:

• draft new stories → CREATIVE

• edit old stories → WORKHORSE

• submit stories to journals → ADMINISTRATIVE

• pitch essays/reviews/criticism → WORKHORSE

• work on a long-form project, e.g. novel → CREATIVE/WORKHORSE

• query agents → ADMINISTRATIVE¹

• research comp titles & competitive titles → ADMINISTRATIVE

• apply to residencies/conferences/grants → WORKHORSE

• create & update a website → ADMINISTRATIVE

• post on social media → ADMINISTRATIVE

• attend book events → SOCIAL²

• read recent publications → WORKHORSE

• network with other writers → SOCIAL

Here again, your labels might differ from mine, but the point is: different tasks require different kinds of energy.

Drafting a novel is a great thing to do when you’re fired up and inspired and high on your own supply. It’s a terrible thing to do when you’re exhausted and baffled and sleep-deprived.

When you’re exhausted and baffled and sleep-deprived, that’s the perfect time to do tedious, mindless, but important things like firing off submissions or tweaking your website. And those tedious but important things are a real waste of your creative energy and inspiration, if you’ve got it running right now.

I have a friend who spends every Friday submitting stories to journals. Friday is his administrative day, no matter how he’s feeling; every other day, he does creative work. This is a much more organized system than mine. And yet, when he and I compare the stats in our Submittable accounts³, we always have roughly the same number of active submissions. Because, at least a few times every month, I run completely dry on creative energy and switch into administrative mode and send out huge batches of submissions all at once. It just kind of evens out.

So if you are more like me than my organized friend, the first step in prioritizing your writing tasks is figuring out: what kind of energy do I have right now in this exact moment? That’ll narrow down your list of possible tasks.

This works whether you have fifteen minutes to spare or a whole weekend cleared. In fact, sometimes I have managed to clear a whole weekend in hopes of making progress on a novel, only to find that I am scattered and distractable and out of ideas. That weekend gets converted into a clearing-the-desk weekend: submitting stories, answering long-avoided emails, and checking off minor tasks that otherwise intrude on my writing time.

I like to think of my different kinds of energy as “the muse,” as in: Where is the muse today? Is she in the creative house? Is she in the administrative house? Is she lying in a ditch by the side of the road? When I am feeling a little bit aimless, but still want to accomplish something, I ask myself where the muse is, and usually I can find her if I poke around for long enough.

So let’s say your muse is in the creative house. Your list of possible tasks is now a lot shorter:

• draft new stories

• work on a long-form project, e.g. novel

Of course, that list still expands into all the different stories and projects you could work on. Should you start a new story or edit an existing one? Should you keep plugging away at the novel-in-progress or brainstorm a new idea? Which brings me to the second golden rule:

Rule 2: Do what excites you.

Always.

I know there’s a lot of advice out there that contradicts this, about pushing through, showing up every day, showing up even on the bad days, gruelingly diligently inching along when you’d rather be doing anything else. It seems like that works for a lot of people, so I’m not going to knock it.

But what works for me is always doing what excites me the most at any given time.

You might think that this would get me stuck in a loop. If, for ten years straight, I’m always most excited about my novel-in-progress, then for ten years straight I would never work on anything else. But because I follow Rule #1 before Rule #2, and because my moods vary as much as my excitement does, I’ve ended up checking off pretty much everything on my writing to-do list without any organized strategy whatsoever.

So just as I recommend being attentive to the kind of energy you have, I think it’s worth being attentive to—and honoring—your natural excitement.

If you can tell that the muse is in the creative house, and you know you really ought to work on your novel, but meanwhile you have this way cooler idea for a new short story… then just write the new short story. If that’s where your excitement is, that’s where you’ll do your best work. Don’t worry about the novel—your excitement will roll back around eventually, and if it doesn’t, that tells you something about the novel.

And if your muse is pacing anxiously around the administrative house, and you have eight things on your administrative to-do list (submit stories, make a website, figure out agents to query, get a better author photo), don’t worry about what is most urgent or most important. Just pick the one that excites you the most.

This strategy was very useful to me last week when I was waiting on some rather significant news. The waiting period took the form of a week-long meltdown that involved checking my phone every forty seconds, sleeping fitfully, and telling my partner in a tight, chipper tone that “All I can do is wait! So I’m just going to wait. I’m not even going to think about it!” at least once per ten-minute stretch.

Obviously, I was not in a fit state to work on my writing. And yet all I could think about, obsessively, was working on my writing. So I asked myself where my energy was (administrative/psychotic) and what excited me the most in that moment (being a famous writer please I want to be a famous writer I really want to be famous and a writer), and I arrived at the perfect task: I needed to spend the entire week obsessively updating all the links on my website and fixing the broken sidebars via a discontinued Wordpress plugin.

That’s what I did all of last week. Was it a good use of my time? No—but it was a good use of my energy, considering that I wasn’t really fit to do anything else. It kept me occupied. It checked something off that I otherwise would have had to dedicate precious creative energy to. And now, there are no broken links on my website!⁴

This week, I’ve felt my creative energy coming back to life. I have even found myself wanting to write new stories, which last week was out of the question. And I’m glad I didn’t spend last week beating myself up for not producing anything creative. I did the best I could with the energy I had. That’s what I’m going to do this week too. I trust that if I spend every day of the year doing the work I’m excited to do, it’ll somehow magically shake out in the right proportions.

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Okay that’s very nice, you’re saying, but what if you have something urgent to do and you don’t have the “right energy” for it? And what if your excitement is not landing on the tasks that are most important to get done? And what if you don’t know which tasks are most important to get done and you just want someone to tell you what to do and when to do it, please?

I have a writer friend⁵ who called me last week. I’ve tried to answer some common writer questions in this newsletter, but I had not anticipated his question: “I just finished a novel,” he said. “What do I do?” And he threw out some options: Do I start a substack? Do I hire a freelance editor? Do I submit stories? Do I look for agents?

Another friend⁶ texted me the same week asking: Curious what you have to say about the delicate balancing act of working on a large project WHILE / AND trying to get your name out there (and having something to include in your bio) by submitting to lit mags or applying for residencies and fellowships etc.

I maintain that (1) identifying what kind of energy you have and (2) doing what excites you will serve you well. But I get that this might feel sort of irritatingly trust-your-gut wishy-washy, so let me see if I can get more specific.

If you’re trying to figure out how best to spend the hours you give to writing, and what tasks you need to accomplish to get where you’re trying to go, start by answering these questions:

1. What is the next step in your writing career?

2. What do you want to be true of you when you take that step?

For example, let’s say that you’re working on a novel—maybe you’ve finished the draft, and you’re mid-revision. The next step you’re looking ahead to is querying agents. What do you want to be true of you when you query agents? You definitely want your novel to be fully revised. You want a strong pitch for it. You also probably want a few things to put in your bio—ideally, some combination of short story publications, essay/craft/review publications, residencies, online followers, degrees, important friends you can name-drop, and professional writing world experience.

You’re not going to have all of those, and you don’t need all of those. Focus on what seems within reach, and what seems fun.

In 2020, I gave up on a novel I’d worked very hard on. I decided that the next time I queried a novel, I wanted some credentials. I had worked in the publishing world, which was one plus in my bio. But I wanted another plus—I wanted to be able to convince agents that my writing had already been vetted by some third party, that somebody in the world out there thought I was good. So I decided it was time to write some short stories and submit them to journals.

That’s what I focused on for a long time, including through the two years of my MFA program: writing short stories and submitting them everywhere. This worked—I got some publications under my belt. By the time I sent my new novel to an agent, I had a decent bio, and the agent picked it up, and the novel sold.

And then suddenly I was looking at the next step: having my novel actually published. And I thought: what I really want to be true of me, by the time this novel comes out, is that I have some kind of platform as like a literary person.

And so my priorities shifted: I started writing and submitting book reviews, and I started posting these meandering essays on substack, and I started pitching criticism. Those were the new tasks. I had no system to how I approached these tasks, or in what order, or in what proportions. Every time I had an hour or so to give to my writing career, I just narrowed the list down from what I had to do, to what I was able to do, to what I wanted to do.

My trajectory is not the “correct” order of operations. You could just as easily start by writing a novel, and then apply to residencies, and then befriend other writers, and then query agents. All of it is useful, and none of it is indispensable. Follow your energy. If you’re out of energy, take a break.

…and if you’re too strung out on your writing ambitions to take a break⁷, do something mindless (administrative) that satisfies your need to push the writing boulder another inch up the hill.

And what if you’re on a deadline and you can’t afford to wait around for the right energy to drift in?

Well, then you probably need to grit your teeth and get down to it. What I’ve been focused on above is how to prioritize when you have dozens of possible tasks and no idea what matters most. If you know what your top priority is—you have a deadline!—then that’s how you should apply your energies, whatever they are.

And what if your energies just refuse to align with your top priority? What if you know you need to edit your short stories and revise your new novel and plan out your next submission and fix those fucking sidebars on your website, and yet all you want to do is write out endless substack essays for your tiny squadron of readers?

Well, then, keep writing those substack essays. And have faith that your excitement will eventually shift. And if it doesn’t, hey, maybe you’ve found your calling.

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I hope this was helpful to you, even if my answer to “What should I be doing right now to build my career as a writer??” turns out to be a heavily asterisked “It depends.”

If you need more practical advice, don’t worry, I do that too sometimes! Here’s

• how to find an agent

• how agents operate

• how editors operate

• how to edit your novel

  • also read this if you’re working on a novel

• how to find good readers

• how to build a platform

I would be SO interested to hear how you break down the different kinds of energy you bring to your writing, and whether it maps at all onto my little schematic. Feel free to incite a fierce debate in the comments.

Thanks for reading! I do take requests, so if you ask a good question via comment or email, I will refer to you as a “writer friend” in my next newsletter—a huge honor.

1. This one is a little complicated, as querying has a lot of different stages that require different kinds of energy. I think writing a good query letter requires some CREATIVE energy, researching agents requires WORKHORSE energy, and the work of sending out and keeping track of queries feels more ADMINISTRATIVE. These are all obviously nonsense terms—feel free to adjust as you see fit.

2. Whoops, new one!

3. Which we do every time we catch up, because we are nerds and have a healthy, loving rivalry going.

4. The sidebars are still broken… couldn’t figure out the plugin… will revisit next time I have the administrative energy required.

5. I know you’re starting to suspect that I’m making these people up, but they’re real, I promise.

6. Also a real person!!

7. Me at all times.