Teaching Is Infectious to My Writing

So I thought that as I majored in writing and I actually have a passion for it, that teaching it would be great.

There are two problems with this line of thought:

1) I was an adjunct, so I never actually made any money. Instead, I had to teach a crazy amount of classes at like four different campuses to make ends meet. And even if I had become a full timer, I realized they didn't make much money either. The result is that I never seemed to have enough time with my students or in analyzing the textbook or syllabus handed to me by the college. I felt as if just keeping myself afloat and on top of grading was about all I could do. As a result, my writing suffered tremendously. I wasn't very relaxed and couldn't seem to find my groove.

2) Teaching writing hampered my ability to free write. When you are often looking at writing at the sentence level, helping students condense their words to what matters, staring at simple sentences that should make sense but for some reason don't--you start to look at your own writing differently. Maybe if I wasn't taking so many classes or had so little time for my own writing, I could have distanced myself more. Even now, teaching one class while working a full time job has left me segregating my writing time to one morning a week. I can't grade before I write as my students' papers will be in my head instead of my novel.

This has become my medicine for this infection. Pick a day and time to write and come hell or high water, write at that time. It has made such a difference to me, and 50,000 words later, I think I am getting better with my infection and can make a clearer distinction.