Today’s when it hit.
So far this year, I’ve managed a post something every day. Sometimes well into the evening. Sometimes written on a commuter train. Sometimes based on a draft of something from a while ago I never got around to completing.
But today I really thought I wasn’t going to get to the page.
I couldn’t see any gaps in the calendar.
Not until a seminar was cancelled, and this time — these minutes right now — appeared.
And so I’m writing in a rush. Sometimes, that’s when the best notes are taken, or the best observations blurted out. Because you’re not able to self-censor.
Usually, if I’m busy all day, I set the alarm early and try to get something done before I have to look at an email.
That something might mean a good solid hour of redrafting, but equally it could be a few housekeeping changes to a draft.
Open the document, wordsearch that word or phrase I know I’m overusing (this month it’s been variants on particular and particularly), change or cut the guilty sentences.
Alternatively, check that single fact. Did X ever meet Y? Is there a photograph of them together? What documentary evidence exists? (ChatGPT, I’ve found, loves to make up entirely fantasized get-togethers.)
Or scribble a couple of lines about what I need to do the next time I have an hour. That way, when there is a gap, I’ll know where to start.
If there’s really no time, except straphanging on the tube or a bus, I’ll read through my current notebook, or put a note in the margin of the book I’m reading.
Among the pieces of writing advice that were widely condemned as the Worst, when I asked you a couple of weeks ago, Write Every Day came in close to top/bottom.
However, I think that doing something every day in a writerly way (sounds awful) — doing something, even if it’s the washing up, so that you’re looking at it and trying to take it in, rather than just ripping through the time so the time is quickly over — that I think is a useful continuity.
You’re saying to yourself-as-a-writer, I’ll get back to you.
I remember when Flipper was a very small and very loud baby, and I had no time to read, and absolutely no peace of mind — I remember standing looking at my books.
My favourite books, on the shelf where I keep them.
They looked about a thousand miles away. But that’s because they were months and months of travel away.
If I reached for them, I got vertigo — time-vertigo.
I remember saying to them, ‘I will get back to you, eventually.’
One day there’ll be time.
[Social media image: Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010.]
I strongly empathise with this, Sanjida. As a former single parent of four I used to tell myself I had no time to write. I found I always became more productive just before school pickup time! (Deadlines).
Now my children are grown and I have lots of other time-commitments but I’m trying to schedule in specific writing times for different writing projects. It’s been two weeks so far and it seems to be working haha. I’m also trying to write more quickly and get the job done.
I remember that feeling when my daughter was little. Time-vertigo is such a good way to phrase it. Now, I am still time-poor and yet time-expansive. There is a school day. It stretches until 3.30!!