On Leap Day, I led a workshop focusing on developing a writing routine and making time to write. It did not escape me that I was teaching this session on February 29, a date that won’t exist again for another four years. We talked a lot about time in that workshop: making good use of it, stealing it, protecting it, and endeavoring to spend it on some things (writing, reading, family) instead of others (Netflix, Facebook, guilt, self-loathing).
I had prepared a list of tips that helped me stick to a writing schedule back when I was working a busy corporate job as well as writing freelance articles on the side, not to mention planning a wedding and trying to maintain a social life. During that time, other writers occasionally asked how I maintained my level of productivity. A colleague at my day job, an aspiring creative writer himself, invited me to lunch to find out for himself. We spread our napkins across our laps, ordered our salads, and then he leaned in and asked the question I’d heard before from other writers overwhelmed by their schedules. How do you do it?
That single question contained many others: How do you write for yourself when this job too often consumes the part of our brains allocated for writing and editing? How do you consistently write fiction and still perform at work and also spend time with your spouse, your friends? How do you manage to go on, despite the odds and the slow progress and the grinding passing of time?
I didn’t quite know how to answer him at the time, but his question was one I considered over the years. I even incorporated it into my PowerPoint presentation for the Leap Day workshop. But that night, as I stood before a giant screen with the words “How do you do it?” emblazoned behind me, I felt a bit ridiculous.
“I’m not suggesting that I’ve done it, past tense,” I told the writers in attendance. “I certainly don’t have all the answers. But I’ve made progress over the years, and I haven’t given up.”
Not giving up, for a literary writer, is a form of progress all on its own.
Time as Construct
My husband and I have a running inside joke. If I mention an upcoming appointment or other time-sensitive matter, he’ll look at me and say, in a grand and pseudo-philosophical tone: “What is time, really?” As if time might be purely hypothetical, an invention created just to stress us out.
If you think about time too much, it starts to not make sense. It becomes insignificant, meaningless. It morphs into Leap Day, a date created out of nothing to fix the gaps in our calendar, which itself is a whole string of days and weeks and months created from nothing. Maybe time is a construct. But for writers, there’s little else more important.
During my Leap Day presentation, I went through my tips one by one: Join a writing group. Set daily word count goals. Find a writing buddy and hold each other accountable. Read about contest and submission calls to stir your ambitions. Write where and when it fits into your schedule, whether that’s on the train during your morning commute or during your baby’s afternoon nap. Venture out of your home and write in a library or café. Learn to live with a messy house and spend the time you would have tidied up to write.
Most of all, wake up early to write. Those early morning hours, that quiet period before the day cranks into full gear, make for fertile writing territory. True, some writers do their best work late at night after the rest of the world has gone to sleep, but for many of us, writing first thing in the morning is a smart strategy. According to behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, the first two hours of the day may well be our most productive. Spend that time tweeting, responding to emails, or playing spider solitaire, and you might have just wasted your best shot at clear-headed, creative thinking.
“If we could salvage those precious hours,” Ariely explained, “most of us would be much more successful in accomplishing what we truly want.”
During my years working as a trade magazine editor, I’d often drag myself out of bed long before sunrise. I’d wait at the bus stop in the cold—in my memory, these early mornings are always set in the winter, though maybe that’s a side effect of living in Cleveland—and catch a bus downtown to my favorite café. Once inside, I’d order a cup of tea or a latte and settle into my usual table. During most of this process, I felt exhausted. I fantasized about another few hours of sleep, and I often questioned whether any of this was worth it. But then the caffeine kicked in, and I began writing. Sometimes, I’d even write well. By the time I packed up my things and walked to the office, I would be satisfied. I’d done my writing work for the day, and all before the stress and deadlines of my day job intruded.
I wrote many stories in that café, and chapter after chapter of a novel that I have since retired to a forgotten folder on my computer. My time was well spent regardless. During those predawn hours, I powered through the difficult moments of my work. I learned. I experimented. I proved to myself I could be a writer despite other distractions. I could be simply myself, alone in a café as the sun rose and church bells chimed on the hour. I could write.
Trading Time for Writing
In addition to concrete tips for developing a writing routine, I offered my Leap Day writers a few broader suggestions. First, don’t expect anyone or anything external to motivate you. Writers who stick with it for the long haul must be independently driven. Next, understand that you might have to give up something—time spent on a hobby, or a few hours of Netflix, or sleep—to make time to write. Finally, you have to want to write, not just be a writer.
I called that last tip “tough love,” but I think my participants understood what I meant. There’s a big difference between dreaming of becoming a successfully published author and the realities of the day-to-day writing life. Of course, the fact that these attendees chose to spend their limited time at a writing event—on a date that won’t come around again until 2020, no less—signaled their commitment.
At the end of my presentation, I added a bonus tip: You are not a terrible person if you don’t write every day. Or even most days. Sometimes, life gets in the way—a baby is born, or illness intrudes, or maybe you’re facing eviction or divorce. Other times, you might be better off reading, resting, or replenishing your creative energy.
We’re all working with the same amount of time. Sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, and three-hundred-sixty-five days in a year (leap years aside). That time, however, doesn’t conform to each of our needs in the same way. Just as some writers are prolific and some produce only one work in the totality of their careers, and just as some authors write quickly while others spend decades on a book, we’re on our own schedules. All we can do is structure that elusive time to suit our needs—and if an extra day comes around every four years, maybe we should steal it for our writing.
In If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland suggested a writer at work should feel “like a child stringing beads in kindergarten—happy, absorbed, and quietly putting one bead on after another.” That quote has always resonated with me. When I do my best work, I’m not worried about the ticking clock. I’m not consumed with “finding” or “making” time to write. Instead, I’m in the moment with my words, my imagination, my creative process.
Time, whatever it is, doesn’t exist.