Octavia Butler woke up in the early hours of the morning to write before going to work whatever job actually made her money whether it was in a factory, as a telemarketer, or even in a hospital laundry.
Walter Mosley writes every day. He’s said that he wakes up around five or six and writes for three hours. He’s also said that he’ll write 1,000 words, read those the next day before writing the next thousand, and so on and so forth.
Maya Angelou would keep a hotel room where she’d go with her bible, playing cards, and sherry wine that she’d sometimes drink as soon as she arrived at six in the morning or at a more reasonable hour…eleven am.
One of the fun rabbit holes of aspiring to be a writer is discovering how other writers have done it. I’ve now experimented with around half a dozen approaches to a writing schedule. I’ve tried committing myself to 500 words a day or 1000 words. I’ve swapped Angelou’s sherry for whiskey. I’ve tried writing at dawn, after lunch, before bed; in the bed, under the sun, in a dark basement. My favorite routine though? Just sitting at my laptop hoping that the words just magically appear.
Between my income driven work as a video editor and the extracurricular activities of swimming and language learning, writing takes up the bulk of my scheduling intentions. I’ll look at the week ahead and commit to devoting about 80% of my time to writing and improving my craft, whether that’s reading, finishing chapters, outlines, or editing. But no matter which vow I make to craft, I end up letting myself down.
For all of 2024, I’m not proud to admit but, I haven’t dedicated enough time to working on my novel. Sure, I dream about working on it, I scribble notes here and there, on loose sheets of paper all around my apartment and on Notion, and wherever I’ll be able to recall that the note exists. But I haven’t sat with any real dedicated intention to simply work on it. To, you know, get from the top of the page to the bottom. And it’s been causing a great deal of anxiety. I actively look for distractions, spend an inexcusable amount of hours rewatching television series (currently The Wire), look for (or invent) what’s missing in my life, and bemoan the loneliness of being a writer with time and freedom, when that’s all I’ve ever wanted in the first place. Be careful what you wish for, right.
However, last week I recommitted to just an hour of writing per day. I’m not sure the how or the why of the timing but it felt like there had been nothing lost in my time away from the project. It was as if the puzzle pieces that led me to procrastinate simply found their place and I was able to jump back into working on the story as though I never left.
Only, as much as I was able to start devoting my energy to the novel again, I felt distant from the newsletter. I gave myself permission to delay posting. First by one day, and then a week. It left me wondering if that’s all there is, I can do one or the other but not both. My ambition and my intention to write can be spread too thin and so even if I’m doing both, one will inevitably suffer for the progress of the other.
Most of this inquiry into how much I write is rooted in the very bedrock of how we’re socialized to do labor. How we’ve been conditioned in a society that promotes “scaling” output as a sign of worthiness. Valuing quantity over quality makes me feel guilty for the amount of time it takes me to practice craft that might lead to one good sentence when I could have spent that time churning out hundreds of okay sentences, and/or dedicated my time to more income-driven activities. It’s our relationship to what we call work and the correlation between exertion and profit. Having something to show for it, and then having more the next day. It’s the always being visible so that even when the work is quite literally about observing more than it is about being observed, you must toe the line of not only doing said work but showing why you’re qualified to do it.
And if I’m being even more honest and more vulnerable, my anxiety comes from having wanted to be special at writing which would explain my willingness to do it. It would be the proof I needed to corroborate the dream. I feel like any artist that I’ve come to admire had some unique talent to want to do it, and perhaps that same talent existed inside of me. But that’s not the case, and not only am I experiencing this unlearning, I’m being humbled by it. Because more than anything it’s the accepting that I’m not a literary prodigy or creative genius or special by any measure to be doing this. I can’t will greatness out of my fingertips, I can only show up and do the work. That’s the routine I know I can do, showing up when and where I can and giving it my full attention.
How has your relationship to writing changed over the years? Do you write consistently, or do you allow yourself space when the creativity just isn’t flowing? Let me know what works for you.
As always, thank you so much for reading and thank you for being here.