WRITING TIME QUESTION: WHAT’S THE POINT?

Writing time is running out?

Now you tell me.

But I don’t agree, or believe it.

My writing time will run out one day, but that doesn’t  let anyone else off the hook.

Unless you’re dead. Then maybe.

I’ve heard, you’ve heard too, that writing time and reading time are the same thing?

Both equally important in getting work done.

I believe it since Stephen King believes it. And I’m easily swayed.

Follow the king’s advice about time management and you won’t go wrong.

Or will you?

There you are doing everything right, producing pages, blog posts, short stories, poems, novels, memoirs . . .

Am I missing anything?

You’re doing it all, feeling good about it, but it’s not enough?

What would be enough?

 

Sarah Carson Explains

What’s the point of writing, anyway? a lady asks the table.

Four weeks of workshops in the library basement and no one has called her a genius yet, asked to see the manuscript she carries in her purse.

I get it.

 

What’s the point? You should be doing something else besides dropping words into deaf, dumb, and blind void?

No.

If you’ve worked to acquire the tools to write, make the time.

Writing tools?

The first tool is your brain, not some software on a shelf.

You’ve got something to say, say it to yourself first.

 

What’s the point of it?

There might not be any point of it—except for those few short hours every day that you get to spend your life doing what you want with it.

Some of us weed the garden. Some of us wish we’d shot more hoops. Some of us write down what we saw.

 

Some of us try and do it all.

I heard this early on: You can either be a writer, or have a life.

What I got out of that?

You can be a writer and drink too much, smoke too much, snort too much, shoot too much, and stay out too late; or you can respect the choices you made to another person to get married and have kids.

The ‘be a writer’ crowd following the drinking and smoking and carousing path might have messy lives full of ex-wives and ex-husbands, and milk a slim book that got good reviews and no sales as their excuse.

The ‘get married and have kids’ crowd may not have a thin book as an excuse, they have partners and kids to help find a place in the world.

Where do family people find writing time in all the hustle?

We help others first, then shut the door for a few hours a day.

 

What Matters For Writing Time

It’s a matter of grammar:

Know your shit, or know you’re shit.

Kurt Vonnegut had his shit detector turned to high for his opinion of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl:

“I like ‘Howl’ a lot. Who wouldn’t? It just doesn’t have much to do with me or what happened to my friends.

For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archaeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg’s closest friends, if I’m not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University.

No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first — and after that biochemistry.

Everybody knows that the dumbest people in any American university are in the education department, and English after that.”

I sat in the second row of Poetry Writing at the University of Oregon after two years in the Army and watched a Graduate Teaching Assistant read Howl to the class like an actor.

He hopped around spraying saliva on the front row to show how much he wanted the kids to know he ‘got it.’

Who knew being a spit rag for a hyped-up hippie was an English major rite of passage.

You get it. You know what you’re doing. Let that be enough, then do more.

 

Doing More

Here’s another one for writer’s who work full-time, keep up with a house, manage kid schedules, and still find writing time.

Add wives and husbands and time grows more elusive.

Too many guys act like it’s their destiny to impregnate women, give the kid some funky name to live up to because daddy somehow knew they wouldn’t be around.

All I know is kids deserve better.

So what are writers supposed to do about that?

Write it out. What did you expect?