When You Are Struggling to Stay in a Writing Routine

The other day a good friend and former student (thanks, Jessika) emailed asking for the name of a classmate who had a writing process she had always remembered.  I came up with the name almost immediately (something nothing short of astonishing given my poor recall for names).  I remembered likely because this classmate's writing ritual is one I shared frequently with other classes through the years.  I tended to rely on this story when students were full of complaints about writing blocks, or when they simply weren't producing.  Call it motivation; call it embarrassment; call it what you will.  They tended to remember her story, as I have, all through these years.

She remains an inspiration to me.  Her name is Leslie.  When Leslie was my student, she had returned to college a couple of years before after taking some time off having nearly failed college once before.  In the intervening years she had served her country in the military, she'd married, had become a mother.  When I knew her she volunteered an extraordinary number of hours at a local middle school on top of her own courses.  She worked evenings delivering pizzas.  She raised children.  Several times a week she drove one son over an hour to the nearest city with a good children's hospital for leukemia treatments.  She was a remarkable student and a remarkable woman.  She was serious about school and she was serious about her writing.

Taking me at my word about the need for consistent work habits as a writer, that year she set her alarm to go off early in the morning.  I mean early.  Like 4:00 or 4:30 such that she could get some writing time in before the rest of the house woke up and she had to start making breakfast and kid's lunches and get ready for her own long days.  One of her sons caught on to her quickly and soon tried to join his mom in the early morning dark and quiet, brought with him his own pen and pad and wanted to join her in writing.  She insisted that he needed his sleep.  And since the plan for alone time to think and to write hadn't panned out, she left the house.  She started writing in the play fort her husband had constructed at the top of the slide for the kids.  This was Colorado in the winter.  It can get cold in a Colorado winter.  Her methodology:  for every page she wrote, she rewarded herself with another blanket.

And how she wrote.  Before the semester was done, not only was her growth as a writer with each piece she submitted to the class, she sold a piece to a national magazine.

My charge to future students was simple:  if Leslie could find a way to write, they could.

On the bad days, I remember her lesson for myself.  I have time now.  I have a warm place, indeed a room dedicated to nothing but writing.  I don't have a child battling cancer.  If Leslie can write, I can find a way to write today.

Your Own Worst Enemy

There will be days (weeks?) when you will hate everything that you write.  The only real solution I have found to this inevitability is to write some more.

Solitude vs. The Hermit Who Forgets to Shower

I've been having something of an ongoing conversation with two writer friends lately.  It's a serious conversation that has important impact on our writing, although we toss in lots of jokes to take the edge off and because we tend to know ourselves and our writerly depressive tendencies well enough to be suspicious of ourselves.  We tend to know that we're capable of never leaving the house, of forgetting to shower and forgetting to breath when the world seems suddenly and surprisingly either a) extraordinarily clear or b) baffling in its complexity.  The conversation is about a writer's need for solitude--that tremendous gift of personal space for long thoughts (which often suggests either neglecting other parts of our lives, failing abjectly at "normalcy," either having money or not caring about money, and generally swimming against the "see me now" tide of the larger culture).  I can only speak for myself, of course.  But I need quiet and time alone to write.  I'm a slow thinker and I need a certain amount of space and time to allow thoughts to form fully.  I need contemplation.  Without it, I'm sunk--both mentally in general and certainly as a writer who (don't say it!) values serious ideas.  I'm painfully aware that the surrounding world is a cacophony of noise (much of it meaningless) and this cacophonous climate that too often can seem intoxicating.  It is a surrounding world that wants action to happen fast, that moves from one thing to the next as quickly as synapses fire, a world that demands attention--all traits that lean against the flimsy framework required by writers asking hard questions about how humans think and work and view themselves and others.

This focus on the need for solitude is an old topic among writers, one perhaps best articulated by Virginia Woolf.  I, at least, need a room of my own to work.  It's the balance point that becomes difficult if one has a lifestyle that allows certain room for contemplative time, for in my experience, with such time and space it is easy to fall entirely into the work, to become swallowed by the book you are writing and largely loose touch with the remainder of the world.  It's easy as well to become to caught inside the mind and all those shouting voices, those contradictions and chaotic arguments.  It's important to resurface.  The most important writers must also be full participants in the actual world if they are to write effectively about the human condition.  We have to participate in community.  Real community.  Increasingly, because nearly all of marketing now falls back upon the writer individually, there must be participation in that larger, less real community of the marketplace as well.  These are competing forces, the need for quiet and solitude and the need for interaction and stimulation, and they are forces that shouldn't be taken lightly.  Finding balance between them isn't as easy to accomplish as the outsider might think.

I am a great believer in balance in all aspects of my life.  We are a culture full of people who too easily get knocked off balance, a culture that tends to go to extremes, for better or for worse.  I've always preferred finding the middle path.  And in this instance, finding a balance point between participating in a culture and contemplating that culture is a requirement for my personal approach to craft.  Part of the trick becomes finding working mechanisms that help me maintain such a balance, tricks that usually come down to little, common sense things like staying on a firm writing schedule, putting writing first before listening to the cacophony of noise out there, taking the long view with writing by working everyday within the immediate, choosing writing projects that can I can remain passionate about throughout, saying thanks each day for the people in my life who believe in me and allow me space to pursue this maddness called writing.

Read a Bad Book

If I start a writing day by first reading something, I tend to read work that I respect, work that inspires me, that reminds me why writing matters and of the role books can have in our lives. I still subscribe to such a theory and advocate its application. However, after a conversation with my oldest daughter about an ethnography she was assigned early on in a graduate course, I am reminded that there is merit and instruction in doing the opposite—read a BAD book.


Why waste your time, you are inclined to say. Well, one could offer the argument that I recall no lesser writer than William Stafford once made, that reading a bad book can bolster your confidence to write a good one. There is something more, I think. It is something that requires you to read differently, for if you are reading a bad book as part of your writing development, then you must identify, specifically, what makes it so bad. Here you can’t just dismiss opinion or consider your reaction a matter of taste, you really have to identify how and why the book fails in its writing. (Remember, there are books written badly on important and compelling subjects and those who wish earnestly to have value, as well as those that simply offer bad “B” movie treatments of tired, weak-limbed, I’m-not-pretending-not-to-waste-your-time wood pulp destroyers.) You must get analytical and study a bad book with the same intensity the smart writer studies a good book. Once identified, the hard part is not repeating the same errors.


Try this useful exercise the next time you are frustrated, but don’t give it too much time because not only are there droves of good books you need to read, you’ve can’t afford another excuse to delay returning to your own work (remembering that it might just take a great deal of bad writing to ever get to the good stuff).

Time

Writers have few real needs.  It can be a simple, fulfilling life.  The commodity I need most is time.  Time to write.  Time to think.  Time to love.  Time to live.

I have learned to edit in short bursts and breaks.  Certainly research can be done in lots of settings and in bits and pieces.  But to truly create text, to find stories and hear characters, I need the luxury of uncommitted hours, a long enough stretch of time to find my way.  We all have busy, crazy lives.  To write is, for me, to run against the grain, to slow down and think with depth, to look into the dark corners.  There is no greater gift than that of time if one tries to lead this writing life.