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Write On! But when? How? Where? [1]

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Date: 2022-06-30

Who do you want to spend time with? Choose wisely...

Welcome to WriteOn, where we discuss writing (in all its forms: fiction, nonfiction, memoir, poetry) each Thursday.

“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?” - Dr. Seuss

The use of time

Time’s passage is what counts the heartbeats of our stories, the same as it does our lives. However, finding time can be complicated. After all, our bodies require food and rest. Our bank accounts require enough to pay for shelter, food, and a multitude of other things — which means we must spend time to fill that account. And then beyond that? Our hearts require time: time with family or friends or our gardens or climbing that mountain you’ve looked at for the last fifteen years and promised yourself that one day…

Writing is also a demanding mistress. After all, sitting in front of a keyboard (or notebook) is not enough. We need time and mental energy — and then! Words appear, but they are not the perfect words. Which means that our stories don’t just require the time to write, but to revise. To edit. To imagine. To dream.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” - Steve Jobs

In one way, Jobs is right. We should strive to be the truest form of who we want to be. In another, as writers, his words are wrong.

To write, we must live someone else’s life. Those are the stories we tell, whether it is the life of a young soldier in 1946 or a child who’s standing in front of a dragon’s egg as it cracks, aware that her life will never be the same again, or the person we were thirty years ago.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

How do we, as writers and coworkers, sons and daughters, friends and parents, figure out how to apportion our time? What parts of our most precious resource do we give, and to whom?

I argue that writing is paying ourselves. If we didn’t dream, we wouldn’t be here. If we didn’t yearn to share, the words wouldn’t come (halting or quickly, fighting amongst each other to emerge first, or being pulled with every strand of our heart, we make them ours). However, writing for many of us is also paying the other. We share our words here — and some of us more broadly. Other people find their lives and imaginations shaped, somehow, by what we have birthed.

Finding the time to write is easy on some days and hard on others. Editing is another challenge, but it’s all part of the writing process and demands its own time and consideration. As we look into another Camp NaNo, this becomes perhaps easier (accountability, if only with your own goal), or harder (as you have a goal you’ve set externally).

For this week, take a look at how and where you spend your time — not just for writing, but in general. Does your writing take the same piece of time on every day, or does it creep in whenever another demand has forgotten to claim your full attention? What will you let take priority over your writing — and what will you cede for the sake of your words?

For anyone participating in Camp NaNo, please include what your goals are for this July! I’ll create a living table.

A personal diversion

I’ve found myself considering time a great deal this year. I have an end date for my current career — the beginning of 2027. After that, my life is a mystery. My father’s medical condition has either been solved by surgery or cannot be — and that’s something we’ll only know by the time we have with him between now and when his hourglass runs out. It has been two and a half years — years! — of the pandemic, and I don’t know where it’s gone. My children keep growing. My husband is a man I love enough to want to keep as a best friend as well as a lover — and we are considering what we want to do with our time after the children are in college, because the money for that must be saved today.

“Time is a storm in which we are all lost.” - William Carlos Williams

Back to writing…

If I want to make writing my next career, I must prove that I can. I have to sell a book before 2027, or I’ll need to find another, second career. In my case, looking at traditional publishing? Time is a thief. From purchase to a publication date is 18 months. However, on submission to publishers can take weeks to a year. Oh, and you must be agented before that, which can also take weeks to a year, assuming that the book I’ve written (and revised! and edited!) is actually of publishable quality. All of a sudden, I realize that time has run out. I must devote time to the manuscripts I keep writing to hide from revising, because I must take one from its raw state to something that can stand on its own two feet and shout to the world that it is ready by sometime next year. And yet I can’t do this alone, which means I also need to spend time on others’ work, both to train my eyes and to get their precious time on my manuscripts.

I’ve found that while I’m most productive in the morning, the only time I have to write that is truly my own is that slice between my children’s bedtime and my own. Evenings are when I can read and comment on the three manuscripts I’ve offered to beta, when I can work on my revisions, when I can dream up the next book — because all of the time it takes to get the first book sold? I will have less than that for the second and third. I must grow faster at using these skills.

So at the end of this rambling mess, here’s the question:

How do you prioritize your writing? When and how do you carve out those precious minutes?

Challenge: Time is not just an issue for us as creators, but for the people we create. How do they react when time runs out?

Happy writing!

READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE

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