The Secret To Writing Is Time (But Not Quite The Way You Might Think)

When I was a little bit younger than I am now, I used to think that the best career for an aspiring writer like myself was to become a teacher. Think about it; you'd be working with the subject that you really enjoyed most, and you'd have those long summers to devote entirely to your writing. In what other job, aside from actually being a full time writer, would you be able to have so much uninterrupted writing time?

The hilarious truth is that now, I think being a teacher is absolutely a terrible job for a writer, or at least, it would be a terrible job for this writer.

It's not that I don't think teaching is an awesome job. I can remember vividly all the teachers who made an impact on my life, going all the way back to the fourth grade and the first teacher, Mr. Dennis, whose idea of a "Writer's Workshop" project no doubt sparked the interest that would eventually morph into basically the cornerstone of my self-identity. I remember all the teachers who inspired me, who challenged me, who believed in me, and even those that pissed me off and made me work that much harder just to prove them wrong by succeeding, which means that technically, they won. To which I say simply: "well played."

But this isn't meant to be a reflection on teaching, since I'm not a teacher myself. And in fact, this idea of mine, that writing and teaching might not go hand-in-hand has nothing to do with teaching in the slightest. Hell, the job in question could be something like professional basket-weaving, assuming that basket weavers are able to take off months during the summer.

See, I've come to realize that one of the great lies of my life is the idea that I'll get work done "when there's more time." It's always been this belief that as soon as I'm not as busy, I'll have all the time I need to do all the things that I want to do. I remember complaining that it was a bad idea to have NaNoWriMo in November, because November is fucking busy. If you're a student, you've got all the big projects coming together at the same time, and you're typically busy at work, and you've got family obligations that all mean your free time is basically nil. How the hell could anybody find the time to write in that maelstrom of responsibilities and deadlines?

And yet, during those hectic, busy 30 days, I wrote 50,000 words. I wrote every day, never once skipping a day because I didn't feel like it. Even when I was busy. Especially when I was busy.

Compare that to December, which is a month that's characterized by weeks of free time. Even covering extra hours at my library job doesn't equal the workload I had trying to juggle everything I had going on in November, and yet, I didn't even write half as much in December as I did the previous month. Part of that was because I allowed myself to slow down, to back off from that breakneck pace. Part of it was the fact that I decided to take a week off from writing when I thought I was done, and then spent the next two weeks after that struggling to figure out how to get back on track.

Those are all part of it, but there's a deeper truth here, and that's this: for me, it is extremely hard to write when I have all the time in the world.

It's hard to write when I'm on a vacation, when I don't have class, when I'm off for six days from work. It's hard to find the energy, it's hard to muster the motivation, it's hard to do anything other than a rotating cycle of waking up late, playing video games, reading, and falling asleep again.

Now, don't get me wrong, those were very fun things and I feel better having done them, batteries refreshed, and all that. But every day that I wasted just lounging around, I thought to myself "I could, and should, be working. Writing. Doing stuff." And each of those days, even as I relaxed,  I felt myself slipping back into the old habits of not writing, of feeling like I "should" write, instead of telling myself that I "will" write. I worried that maybe I'd backslid completely and I'd lost the spark that drove me through over 60,000 words of my current novel manuscript.

And then I went back to work, pretty much worked open to close the last two days, with another two coming up, and here I am, writing away again, and hopefully in good form. Considering how much I wrote on the novel tonight, how easily it came and how satisfying it was, I'd certainly say that I'm back, and thankfully, I was able to do it in two weeks rather than two years, like last time.

Why is this, I wonder? You could call it inertia, maybe, something about how a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Actually, the more I think about it, I realize that's incredibly apt. It's always so much easier to come home from a long, hard day and write for two hours than it is to wake up a Saturday when I have nothing to do and tell myself I'm going to write before I do anything else. The latter has never, ever happened, to the best of my knowledge. The former happened every day for a month and a half straight.

And that leads me back to my main point; if I want to succeed as a writer, if I want to live the dream of writing every day, the secret is not to find ways to cut out larger and larger chunks of my time so I'll have them to devote to writing. The secret, the trick, the true key is to find out how to fill my life, how to keep busy, how to keep my plate full, keep that calendar bustling, because when I'm faced with the prospect of not having time to write, it's then that I carve out those precious 40 minute blocks that powered me through NaNoWriMo, those precious hours that fueled my first novel attempt since I was sixteen.

Because now I realize, now I understand that if I have two whole weeks to do as much writing as I want... I'm going to waste it. I'm going to play video games, and watch movies, and do everything I can to waste as much time as possible. But if I only have a tiny bit of time, if I only have an hour... well, hell, I can't waste that! It's the only hour I have!

And it makes me glad to know that given that single hour, I'd much rather spend it writing rather than doing anything else.