Opinion

Time to Write

Saul Worman, an information design teacher, begins his classes by telling students that the big design problem isn't designing a house or a toaster or a book. It's designing your life so that you do what you really love to do every day. For writers, this means having time to write.

Before you design your life, you must understand yourself and your situation. You might not be able to change yourself (you procrastinate) or the people you live with (they interrupt) but luckily, you're creative. Designing is the process of removing the obstacles between you and what you want to do. Here are some tips and tricks for finding time to write:

For me, the big shift occurred when I decided that writing was my priority and the rest of my life needed to be shaped around it. That's when my job simply became a way to support my writing. I considered carefully how much income I needed, how many hours I was willing to work, and what sorts of work complemented my writing. I'm still tinkering with this equation, but I think I'm getting closer to the ideal.

Writergrrl Angela Fountas has pared down her getting-ready-for-work routine so she can spend at least a half hour on her novel every morning. On weekends, she puts in two to three hours a day. She says working on it during the week is essential so she doesn't have to start cold on the weekend: "Writing comes so much more easily...if I spend even the tiniest of increments writing on busy days." One of my students, Dorothy T, wrote her first novel during her lunch hours.

Jean Servan-Shreiber, in The Art of Time, writes, "Often we act as though it is legitimate to take time for ourselves only when we have satisfied all the demands of others—in other words, never." I write for two hours every morning. When I'm done, I'm not panicked wondering how I'll get everything done because I still have a whole day ahead of me.

It's all a grand experiment. Find out what works. Spend a week writing in the mornings, then a week writing at night. I always thought I could only write late at night until I tried morning writing (during a stint of unexpected unemployment). But I knew for sure I couldn't write in the afternoons. Then one week when all my mornings were tied up, I tried afternoon writing. Guess what? It worked.

Seattle poet Ann Hursey schedules retreats away from the demands of family and job in order to nurture her writing. She suggests starting small, with afternoon dates, and gradually working up to a long weekend.

I'm more likely to keep an appointment with a friend than an appointment with myself, so I make dates with writing buddies. On Thursdays, I meet my novel buddy and we brainstorm ideas for our novels in progress. I meet my tango/writing buddy every other Wednesday and we spend two hours together, checking in, writing about tango and then reading.

I might be biased here since I teach writing classes, but I think this is one of the finest ways to cultivate writing. You have a commitment to go somewhere and talk and think about writing, and you know someone expects to see your efforts. There are many other benefits as well: sparks of inspiration, structure, and camaraderie.

Mine is a chapter a week. I adopted this goal after hearing James Galvin speak at the Centrum writing conference. He said you couldn't consider yourself a professional writer unless you wrote a story a week. I figured this meant that if I wanted to be a professional novelist I had to write a chapter a week. I don't always meet this goal but it helps me to aim at something. Other writers use time goals (2 hours a day) or quantitative goals (so many pages or words a day).

Isabel Allende starts all her books on January 8th, the day she started her first novel. I love the sense of the pressure this would bring to finishing the previous novel, and the anticipation this would engender. And it would also build into your body a sense of the seasons, as the year circles around to your new beginning.

Nancy Sackman Baughman writes a novel every summer. Last year it was a time-travel romance. Her summer novels are always more frivolous than what she researches and writes during the rest of the year. Consider how you relate to the seasons. Think in terms of your energy, recreational activities, and other work loads. Align your life so you can do more writing at times when it feels most natural.

If you really like extreme time pressure, try writing a novel in a month. Check out www.nanowrimo.com for information on National Novel Writing month (November) and the organization which helps aspiring novelists keep track of their words (29 of the 140 entrants last year finished a 50,000 novel in the thirty days of November). If that's not ambitious enough, you could enter Anvil Press's annual contest and write a novel over Labor Day weekend. For more information, check out www.anvilpress.com/3daynov/index.htm.

Were you the sort of college student who stayed up all night writing your papers the night before they were due? Then you might need the adrenaline rush of working to a deadline. It's hard to impose one on yourself and take it seriously. So I collect information about contests, grants, and residency programs, and use these deadlines to pressure myself into writing. That's why I promised to write an article for the Seattle Writergrrls zine. Like a clever junior high school teacher, they actually give you several small goals so you can't get too far behind. And it worked!

Waverly Fitzgerald is a freelance writer and teacher who is obsessed with time, a fixation which manifests in strange ways, such as her addiction to planning and her devotion to seasonal holidays—as displayed on her Web site: www.schooloftheseasons.com.