Do we all need a day of rest?
And is one day every seven, whether it’s a Sunday or a Saturday, about the right spacing for this?
I’ve increasingly begun to think so.
But if you’re trying to write, and you work Monday to Friday, and socialise on Friday night, Saturday lunchtime or afternoon, and Sunday lunchtime, then the odd free weekend day — because of a cancellation or an illness or a religious holiday — can be a godsend.
Any writing hour is a good hour.
And that goes for quarter hours, too.
The opened time in the hospital waiting room, or when the baby’s asleep, or while the bus is changing driver.
Scheduled breaks don’t work for me.
Even in anticipation, I resent them.
I have to try writing, see that it’s not happening, and then give myself a last-minute holiday.
At different stages in a work, I’ll want to leave different length gaps. But I can’t predict them.
Sometimes the best you can do on a given day is note down a line of dialogue that you’ve overheard, and that you wouldn’t have overheard if you hadn’t been in that cafe or that queue.
Going to the cinema or to a gallery or a park — these can be be full of small gifts that your own model-making would never have come up with.
I used to spend hours flicking through the LPs and CDs in Tower Records, and HMV, and Rough Trade, not buying anything, just looking at the top halves of album covers — and, if the top half of this or that was interesting enough, pulling it out and looking at the bottom half.
Maybe you’ve got something completely different, as your mini-Sabbath. Maybe it’s something I couldn’t possibly guess.
I hope so.
Nice to hear someone else has a hard time planning their time to write.