Dear Readers,
Someone dropped me a private note and asked about my writing schedule and what it’s like to be a writer on a day-to-day basis. I suspect he expected a tale of workaholism. I’m not a workaholic, but I’m committed to this work — and have been, my entire life.
Here we go– when I don’t have something unavoidable going on and when I’m not heading into a deadline (deadlines make me get up at 6 or 7 and fall asleep sometime after midnight — even if the novel is done, yet I want to keep revising it and cutting it as long as I can):
1. Wake up between 8:30 and 10.
2. Make coffee, take dog out, take dog back in, feed cat, check rabbits and mice.
3. Time with spouse. Figuring out the course of the day. Knowing that it may be chaotic. Usually check facebook, often from the treadmill or the exercise bike.
4. At some point, my lack of puritan work ethic kicks in and I think of doing things other than write.
5. Somewhere between 11 and 1, I sit down and do some writing.
6. Now that we’re in a new house, there are about twenty extra things to do each day. If I’m lucky, I manage one of them. Because of the recent move — and the fish pond and other property maintenance — I’m sore in ways I haven’t been since never. I’m convinced I’ve dislocated my shoulders and knees and I may be missing a rib.
7. I think about writing no matter what I’m doing, unless I’m sleeping. Even then, I’m not so sure.
8. I quit writing for the day when I can no longer write for the day. This doesn’t necessarily mean exhaustion — it often means when a problem in writing presents itself and I have to spend time thinking about it, wandering a bit, mulling it over. Or else, it’s when a friend calls to go grab a cup of coffee and it’s easier to say yes to that than stare at the page. Or when I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s new novel and I’d just rather live in that world awhile. Some days go great and I write and write and write until supper. Regardless of whether I’m writing for eight hours or twelve — or three — I tend to avoid all but a handful of friends when a book is in my head.
Too much socializing invades the privacy of my imagination and starts to push it back down into the deep well. I honestly would be happy in a monk’s cell or a prison cell, so long as I could write and read and maybe watch a few junk tv shows each week (or gothic classics from the ’60s like The Real Housewives of the Valley of the Dolls etc. ) And perhaps — in both a monastery and prison — I’d need a supply of cigarette for trading in order to explore the finer aspects of such an existence.
9. Writing fiction is a point of view on life as much as it is a job. If I resist writing, I’m living in hell; if I give in to it, and it goes well, I’m living in a better place; if I give in to it and it goes badly, it’s straight back to hell with me. But I love it. I’d rather be in hell writing than in the other place, not.
10. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I get up and go to my desk and start writing because some lightning bolt hit and I don’t want to miss that moment. But this is just now and then, and I can’t depend on lightning.
11. The physical act of writing can be with a fountain pen or Bic, Macbook or iMac. I tend to write in longhand when problem-solving because there’s something about that extra bit of direct contact of hand to pen to paper that pushes out what I’m holding back. When the “flow” happens, I’m on the computer.
Side note: I find that mathematics helps relax my mind. Not really difficult math problems — closer to arithmetic and algebra, both of which I hated as a kid. But somewhere between creating equations out of everyday events — and some Sudoku — I can sit at my desk and take a writing break that seems to refresh my mind. Doodling in my notebooks helps, too. I’ve been a lifelong doodler, and I think it opens my brain a bit — and the images seen to be almost missives from some undiscovered world.
12. Sometimes I dictate sections of a book using Dragon Natural Speaking software — but these are rough notes and brief paragraphs just to break up a boulder in my mind. Often, these are research notes. As have many writers before me, I’ve discovered that research often confirms the flights of the imagination.
What I haven’t mentioned are the walks, the errands, the despair (at times), the deep conviction that I’m not up to the task of the current book, the crazy-in-love feeling when a section of the book goes great, the wintry pause when doubt slams me in the face and I read every page as if it contracted some terrible disease — no doubt some wood-boring beetle that is, unseen, destroying its foliage. These are foibles of the frozen mind, and at some point, I skate over its pond and manage to make a joke of my own worst thoughts. If all goes well. And I love the entire thing. And it drives me a bit nuts.
