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A few months ago, I got caught up in the insanity that is the Facebook application Farmville.  For those of you who have managed to miss it (and since there’s something like 9 million users, I imagine there are precious few of you) Farmville is a game that allows you to own a small farm.  You have a bank account, small at first, with which you can purchase seeds. You then plant the seeds, let ‘em grow, then harvest them for a return.  Pretty straightforward.  You’re also allowed to give — and receive — gifts from your “neighbors” a.k.a. people in your friend list who you’ve asked to be your neighbor in this game.

I am a competitive person.  I would’ve probably abandoned the whole thing if my brother, at the time expecting his first child with his wife, hadn’t joined as a way to kill some nervous energy.  From then on, in our usual fashion, it was social network gaming war.  (He actually texted me with rantings from “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” when I got ahead of him.  Yes, we are nerds, and this is how we roll.)  I managed to rack up some impressive numbers, and I apologize to everybody who had to witness the frequent postings of what the heck I was up to in the game.  I’m sure the last thing you wanted to hear was continual postings that I’d yet again managed to level up to “Fantastic Farmgirl” or whatever.

That said, I did manage to pick up a few really helpful tips from the game, that apply to my writing:

• Be patient.  You’re not going to have a lot of money, so you’ll want to buy “crops” that return the most money, and those usually take a few days to harvest… which, to any online gamer, can feel like a year.  When applied to my writing, I realized that while a quickie editing assignment might give me a short term feeling of accomplishment, it’s plugging away at my novel — and building my fiction career — that’s going to give me the most satisfaction and greatest “return” down the line.
• Do something every day. One of Farmville’s more insidious qualities is that, if you ignore the crops you’ve planted, instead of waiting around for you to get it in gear and harvest them, the darned things rot and you’re out the money.  So you’ve got to pay attention and check in on your farm pretty much every day.  Same thing with writing projects, I think.  Granted, a writing project will just sit there without “rotting.”  Still, if I don’t write every day, I let the specter of my project build until I’m intimidated.  I back myself into a writer’s block.  Only took me ten years and endless protests of “I’m a cyclic writer… I write in big fits and spurts… I need time to process” to realize it was all a smoke screen.  I feel like an idiot, but I’m finally on a daily writing schedule, and it has made a huge difference.
• Help your neighbors. One of the ways I soundly whipped my brother’s score… ahem, I mean, succeeded in improving my farm <g>, was through helping other farms.  If nothing was going on and I was waiting for crops to grow, I would wander over to a friend’s farm and fertilize or clear weeds or something.  I got points every time I helped someone else, as well as experience. It’s a wonderful lesson to learn, especially since as a writer, I tend to isolate and insulate.  If I’m stuck on a project, or I’ve done my daily page writing, then I like to help other writers.  That means blogging here, or critiquing, either for hire or through my crit group.  If I hadn’t received a wealth of helpful information from people in my writing chapter, I would not be a published writer.  Besides, every time I go through someone else’s manuscript, I learn more about my own craft.  It’s a win-win.
• Use a strategy, and know what the end result should be. As far as Farmville, I had only one goal: to beat my brother.  I knew that I had to pick crops that would have the best return on investment; I needed to rack up experience so I could qualify for the higher-paying crops, which meant both planting crops that gave experience, and helping neighbors.  I only had a little bit of time a day when I wasn’t working or watching my son, so I had to pick things I could do easily, and I chose Farmville as my “down time” at night.  All that added up: I picked a few useful steps that became habits, created a simple but effective system.  Now, with my writing, my end result is continuing to support myself as a full time writer.  The only way I can do that is by picking projects that will have the best return, as well as ones that I can do well and potentially break out with as a result.  I need to balance the timing of all the projects I have going — writing, ghostwriting, editing.  I need to balance my work with my family.  And in the end, I need to choose fun things that will nourish me in my “downtime.”  All of this I’ve incorporated into a habitual, simple, and effective “system.”

I realized that, given what I wanted my end result to be, I had to quit the game.  The lessons I picked up, obvious as they are, have actually stuck.  I’m now busier this year than I’ve been since the birth of my son, I’m balancing it all better, and I’m confident that I’ve got a strategy to handle whatever comes moving forward.

Now, who says playing games is completely useless?