Time Is Not On My Side
There are a couple of online writing communities to which I belong. I don’t know any of my fellow writers in person. I would not recognize their names or faces if I saw them outside the context of the online social group. A few of them are older than I am. One is in his 70s. Probably there are one or two in their 80s. This is comforting. I don’t think I’m too old to begin exploring a new creative pursuit, but if I were my 20-something self observing my present 40-something self, I might wonder – what the hell am I doing?
On the other hand, I always expected that I would get better with age; I would fit myself better, I suppose. I was a middle aged person in a young person’s body, strangely looking forward to gray hair and fine lines. I think most people who knew me when I was in my 20s would agree that I was always a little too responsible. Except for the rebellious cigarette smoking and that one tattoo, I was pretty straight and narrow in terms of life choices. I still am.
No, the time “issue” is not one of my age. It’s more about the time I have, or don’t have, in a given day, to spend writing. I wrote about 2000 words this morning in my novel. Ideally, I would do that (at least that) every day. As it is, I mostly manage to do it once or twice a week, usually on Saturday and/or Sunday. Very occasionally, I find some time on a week night. One day last month I took a personal day so that I could spend more than an hour writing. I think I spent about 3-4 hours writing and produced about 5000 words. That was amazing. It felt so good. I took my ancient PC netbook down to the lounge in our apartment building and parked myself in a semi-comfy chair, laptop on lap, for 1-2 hours at a stretch. It was cold because the air-conditioning was pumped, so I had a hoodie on. I doubt anyone took much notice of me. Writing on my lap is not ideal; the computer gets hot after awhile, and my neck sometimes gets sore; I prefer a desk. But it was better than being distracted in my apartment. This is one of the drawbacks to pursuing fiction writing at this point in my life. My husband and I live in a studio apartment. There is one large room, a small alcove for his office, a separate kitchen, and a bathroom. It’s small. And most of the time, that’s fine. But if I am to write fiction, I need silence and no distractions so my imagination can wander unrestrained by reality. That’s nearly impossible when my beloved, sweet, wonderful husband is awake. It’s not that he intentionally distracts me, or that he is bothersome in any way; it’s just hard for me to focus when he is up and about. I want to talk with him and hug him and interact. I need an office with a door that closes. But that won’t happen anytime soon, so the lounge downstairs is a decent substitute for now. And when there are people down there, I just put my ear plugs in. I don’t know them personally, so they are not as distracting as my husband. I am not interested in their conversations.
Time…carving it up in productive ways has constantly been a challenge for me, long before this writing pursuit came about. I keep trying to wake up early on weekdays to spend at least 20 minutes writing before work. I like writing in the mornings. The only downside is that our cats are hyper so they sometimes jump on my desk, and by extension, my keyboard. But that is tolerable because they’re cute and they make me laugh. The hardest part about morning writing is that I have a painfully difficult time getting out of bed in the mornings. That will probably never change.
As a personal challenge to my use of time, I am considering doing NaNoWriMo this year; it’s a little daunting. I would need to get most of my writing in on weekends. Weekdays would be extremely difficult. Maybe Thursdays I could get in a few hundred words, but mostly I’d need to be writing thousands of words on the weekends. Like 9000 words per weekend. That’s a little nuts. If I’m on a roll, I can write a little over 2000 words in an hour. I type pretty quickly and when the ideas are flowing, I just go with it. But still…
It feels like such a dumb problem to have. First world problem, for sure. Then I read about Toni Morrison and how she worked full time and raised two children on her own and still managed to find time to write early in the morning (at 4-freaking-am! according to Wikipedia) and I think, damn, I am so lame. I don’t even have kids. There must be a way to do this without making myself sick from sleep deprivation and totally abandoning all of the other things that keep me healthy and sane, like exercise.
Saying “no” to things will help. I will have to say “no” to more things than I usually do. And I’ll have to not feel bad about it. Time is not an infinite resource for an individual. If I want to finish the first draft of this damn book before, I don’t know, before the 2020 election, let’s say, then I need to get crackin’. NaNoWriMo might be just the thing I need to kickstart a new daily writing schedule.