Nuts & Bolts
Public Relations

Coping with Crises: How to line your Business with Safety Cushions

By Ruth Thaler-Carter, WIW Member

One great way to plan for the unforeseen emergency is to do your darndest to get work done early. This way if you've already met your major deadlines when a crisis occurs, you can relax and focus on getting your health back together. That early income will be nice, too.

A good method of making sure your deadlines are met, even in the event of an emergency, is to set "false deadlines"-pretend assignments are due a week or more before they really are. You can even group your deadlines in batches so that you have built-in, regular breaks in which you can schedule elective surgery, vacations and other important interruptions to your writing life.

Have a variety of assignments.
Having a variety of assignments is a good hedge against emergencies. Some activities related to independent writing can be done while flat on your back or at a low ebb in terms of stamina, such as phone interviews, short bursts of computer and Web research, dictation or light editing. If you usually spend work hours out at meetings or conferences, report to an office every day or sit at the copy desk of a newspaper, you may even be able to do some actual writing in bed, using a laptop.

Recuperation time may also give you a chance to organize projects, files, style guides-all kinds of things on your long-range "to do" list that real life never leaves you enough time to handle.

Recovering from a health crisis can also give you time to build up other aspects of your writing life. If you usually spend many hours at the library, take the recuperation period as an opportunity to learn how to do Internet research. In addition, you may not be able to sit up for hours writing, but you can probably do phone marketing and research, laying the foundation for writing projects that you will complete when you are fully recovered.

Get a partner or two.
Because of the inherent loneliness of the writing life, it's especially vital to develop back-up colleagues for when you cannot function at your best. At such times, it's very important to have someone-a person, not software or equipment-whom you can trust to produce the essential aspects of your work. It has to be someone who will work at your level of quality and who won't steal your clients.

If the backbone of your writing life involves attending and writing up meetings and conferences, a dependable colleague is vital to keeping your professional image intact during a crisis. Use WIW and other professional associations to find someone you can send to those meetings who will represent you professionally and bring back tapes and detailed notes that you can use to write up the programs, or to do the writing from your notes or dictation. Be sure to "road-test" such colleagues ahead of time; we all know that there can be a huge difference between the edited, published version of an article and someone's original manuscript!

Be prepared to offer a few bucks as well as some visibility, perhaps with a shared byline, for anyone who can help you out. In addition, be prepared to help your colleague out if he/she is ever in need.

Developing good relations with your neighbors is a version of partnering, especially for writers who live alone or who have no family living locally. If you live in an apartment building, stay on good terms with the management and staff; you never know when you'll need their goodwill to back you up when income is low or you can't get out of the house for supplies.

Also, make sure that you are friends with a couple of neighbors who might be willing to bring you the mail (not every mail carrier will do apartment-door deliveries) and the odd load of groceries, or run banking errands for you. Consider posting a note in the mailroom to see if anyone else in the building is also a writer; you'd be surprised at the serendipitous possibilities. If you live in a house, try to develop good relations with immediate neighbors. The best option for anyone in a rural area is to stay friends with the UPS, FedEx and mail carriers.

A sunny side of freelancing.
While a sudden bout of sickness can be frightening, a health crisis can reinforce some of the benefits of working at home. For instance, you can work a little at a time in short spurts. Doing even a little work can distract from pain and keep up your morale. Here's hoping that you won't need to learn these lessons from experience.

This article originally appeared in the January 2000 issue of The Independent Writer.