Making the most of pockets of time

I’m finding myself pressed for time these days—and “pressed” is a perfect word for it. When you press down hard on something, something has to give. Something goops out the side. When the hours of my day are packed full, what goops out for me is my writing.

Why writing? I think it may be because it’s something I’m not rewarded for, and no one is depending on it. There’s no paycheck linked to my completion of a sonnet. My short stories don’t need homework help. I’m not married to my essays.

And there’s another, bigger reason, too: Writing is hard. It has its technical challenges, obviously, but I’m talking about something a little different here. Good writing, even if it’s the wildest, most impersonal fiction, gets down into our messy inner places. If it’s good, it digs into us, and that’s uncomfortable—even painful at times.

It becomes easy to avoid our writing when our time is limited. We may continue to make time for social media or TV shows, but isn’t it true that writing well requires more time than that? We can passively poke around the digital world while doing other things, but writing requires our whole selves, and it’s not something we can easily hop in and out of.

In most days, I find that I have brief windows of time that no one has a claim on. I’m talking about the ten minutes in the school pickup line or the five minutes on hold with the cable company. As an instructor, maybe it’s the fifteen minutes of in-class writing time I assign my students, or five minutes in the parking lot after work.

These windows aren’t enough for me to write something. Even a small poem requires time for reflection; I’m not just putting down words. But they are useful for keeping the pump primed, the flow going. Lately, I’ve been trying to make the most of my pockets of time, so that when I do have an hour or more of writing time, I’m not empty. There’s something right there at the surface I can draw on to begin.

For those in the same position I am, here are a few five-minute jump-starts I’ve found useful:

Listing. Listing is such a powerful creative technique. A quickly generated list is weird and associative, and it’s practically self-propelling. One item flows into the next. When our inner censor is turned off, we can make surprising connections—the same kinds of connections I love to make in poetry. A journaling type of list is one possibility (“Ways to make more of my time”), but we can also go in a more creative direction (“Ten things I didn’t expect to find on Mars,” or “Reasons I choke on water”). The more fanciful, the more I like them.

Character sketches. This seems like a fiction exercise, but writers in any genre can stay limber by writing a character sketch, or even a description of a real person. I wrote a poem not long ago about my junior high government teacher, who sexually harassed me and treated me very cruelly (#MeToo). Before I wrote about him, I worked to remember him—the sheen of sweat on his upper lip, his nipple-high trousers. My character sketch didn’t end up in my poem, but the vivid memory of this man prepared me to tell my (tardy) truth.

Word associations. This is just what it sounds like. I start with a word, and then I write a new word that the first word calls to mind. I try to avoid forming any kind of narrative; writing in columns down the page instead of in paragraph form is a helpful strategy. I think it must be a characteristic of our minds that we try to make meaning and build associations. What looks like a list of words often tells a secret story, usually about ourselves.

Haiku. If we wanted to write a worthy haiku, we would need much more than a brief window of time in which to do it. This is far from a throwaway form, and I have a great deal of respect for it. But when we’ve pulled forward at the fast-food drive-thru to wait for our fries, we can bust out a quick three lines based on whatever is visible through our windshield. Not everything we write is for posterity, or even for publication, and a pocket-of-time haiku keeps our observational powers honed.

Create a prompt. This idea comes from fiction writer Michael Czyzniejewski, who says he often uses moments when he’s on the run, walking from here to there or standing in the grocery line, to think of a way he can be creative later. When writing time becomes available and we hit the page with a prompt in mind, we save some time that we might otherwise spend trying to decide what to write about.

Envision a revision. I suspect all writers have memories of good ideas that didn’t take off, or any number of failed drafts. Why not take five minutes to apply a new perspective to those pieces? I’ve always found time and distance useful to solving my composition problems.

Read. We can always benefit by sticking a book in our bag to provide inspiration. I also love reading short pieces online. A great place to read the best flash fiction around is SmokeLong Quarterly, and for nonfiction, I love the essays and brief craft pieces in Brevity. I also like to read a poem and noodle over it for a bit, just to see where it might transport me.

Give a lecture. This is embarrassing, OK, but I’m going to put it out there. Sometimes I like to give little lectures to imaginary classrooms about some aspect of writing. It’s just a thing I do when I’m by myself, maybe driving a long distance. The thing about lecturing is that the lecturer is forced to clarify her own thoughts before communicating them with others. The faux lecture, an apparent act of foolishness, can actually be very instructive.

Even the busiest person can eventually carve out an hour or two. These five-minute exercises can keep us limber enough to make the most of our time when our lives allow it.

Our scraps cannot sustain us

A friend has been accumulating snippets and scraps over the years—little bits of a book-length essay project she’d like to write when she clears her decks of some other pressing projects.

They’re like hors d’oeuvres, these scraps—pops of flavor, about as satisfying as a cocktail wiener on a pick. They’re good or even beautiful, but their job is not to fill us.

Most writers know what it’s like to have a dream project on the back burner. Sometimes these are things we pursue in pockets of time here and there, but other times we leave them to languish. I’m confident that my friend, also named Karen, will get to hers eventually—she’s the kind of person who does. The Karen who is writing to you now will likely never finish that draft of a romance novel she once began as an office-hours project, but she is likely to knock out the publishing textbook she’s been working on for a few years.

My friend’s project is a travel narrative, probably composed of discrete essays, about her relationship to a particular special place. When ideas occur to her, she writes them down, and sometimes her morning pages or other occasional writing includes observations about the topic that’s so close to her heart.

She suggested I tackle this topic in a post—what do we do with our scraps when we’re writing toward something larger?

My answer may be a little disappointing, because we like to think that the work we do is going somewhere, adding up to something—but most of the time, I don’t think we can paste in these segments and arrive at a satisfying whole. These bits and pieces have done their job by keeping our dream project front and center in our mind. The work itself—those words we once jotted on the gas bill—may not be entirely useful.

My friend and I have both fallen into the trap a busy life poses. With so much happening, there aren’t long days to spend at a desk and noodle, daydream, follow our thoughts to their termini; instead, we teach a few classes, grade a stack of papers, handle some correspondence, roll clay into snakes or build Lego spaceships, cobble together some kind of dinner .... People expect things from us, and nearly all of our time is spoken for.

It’s probably tempting to suggest that we don’t need to read someone a bedtime story, but just try telling that to the someone. We need to work; we need to cook and clean and do laundry; we need to make love and exercise and pray and call our mom. Some of this we can put off for a day, but it’s always a matter of shuffling for those of us who have no independent fortune, no patron.

And we’re left with our paltry scraps. For me, they’re usually indistinguishable from garbage, and in fact they’re often made of garbage. That McDonald’s receipt in the recesses of my purse is actually the start of a poem. Those notes on my church bulletin are loose associations that reflect some early thinking about an essay. They’re what I did with the time I had—the “pull forward while we wait for your fries” time; the lost-in-thought-during-the-sermon time.

As difficult as it seems (and, indeed, as difficult as it is), we owe it to ourselves and to our art to make more time for creating, and until we do, I’m not convinced the shortcuts work.

Imagine you’re my friend, and you’re finally at your desk, with time to sort through scraps—some physical, some digital; some overlapping earlier ideas, some going in a new direction; some exciting, some downright inscrutable, whether it’s the idea or the text that is messy.

Does she have a start? Maybe, somewhere in the mix. But it seems to me that she also has a potential distraction during her precious writing time. We like to preserve what we’ve already made—no one wants to re-do old work. But the act of preserving a snippet requires us to organize our thinking around old ideas. We’re always evolving, and the person who wrote a note, or even several pages, is not the person who is sorting scribbled-on receipts right now.

I’ll be honest; often I can look at the start of a poem and pull it from the fire. Poems are often very small. It’s not the same for me with elements of a larger, more ambitious piece of work. That river we slosh into for the second, third, fourth time is just a mimic of that estuary we remember. We dried off. We’re wet with new waters.

Let’s resolve to give ourselves what time we can cobble together—those weeks when we don’t have grading, those days when fast food will suffice, those nights when one bedtime story will do. Where possible, let’s string those spare moments together into an hour, or two, or five—a workday, a whole day, a weekend. And let’s not start with our own intellectual table scraps. Instead, let’s mix up something more sustaining from the creative pantry.

Aren’t you hungry?

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Making the most of a writer's time

Badger, Sir Thomas Browne, 1658

To reach our goals, it’s important to have a mission and a plan. Even more than these elements, though, we need to have time—and time, in fact, is the only absolute necessity.

I’m thinking of writing, although “mission” feels like more of a corporate term than an artistic one. As long as we devote some time to writing, we can muck around without a mission or purpose, and we can feel our way without a plan. But there’s no substitute for time. Writers have to write down some words, and this happens in a unit of time—a few seconds spent scrawling on the back of an envelope, an entire day drafting at a desk. You can take away the envelope or the desk, but you can’t subtract time from the equation and still say that one has written.

This formula for achievement of goals—mission plus plan over time—works for every goal, even beyond writing. We could have a mission to get fit and a great exercise plan to follow, but if we don’t spend time exercising—if we don’t act on the plan in real life—nothing changes for us. There is power in having a vision, but most of that power has to do with the way it changes our actions. I have a lot of desires, but I can’t think my house clean; I need to dip into my limited pool of time to pick up toys or scrub the shower.

My last two posts here have talked about mission and planning as ways to make the most of summer writing time that academics frequently have high hopes for. Summer, I’ve found, can get away from us if we do what we feel drawn to—sleep in, laze about, soak up the sun. With an idea of what it is we’re about, and a plan for what we’d like to accomplish, we might be tempted to go with what feels good. Sometimes that’s exactly what we should do—and it’s undoubtedly a good idea for at least some part of our free time.

But a big part of the plan is how to execute it with the resources we have, and our most important (and most limited) resource is time.

The outset of summer is a perfect time to craft a schedule for meeting our goals (and perhaps for starting a habit of intentional use of time, even though the schedule might change). Here are some steps to consider for making the most of time:

* Take a realistic look at the twenty-four hours in a day. Figure on eight hours for sleep, even though eight full hours of sleep is a pipe dream for me; still, that’s a healthy target, and I wouldn’t advise low-balling sleep, or making a plan that steals from our need to be good to ourselves.

* Start to chart out a calendar, with the understanding that your Mondays are different than your Thursdays—each day brings its own commitments and challenges.

* Make a place on the schedule for those elements that can’t be omitted—like childcare or work. It helps to know the difference. We actually can let the dishes stand in the sink for a day. We can forego a shower or a favorite show. Children are going to need to eat, but we can forego an hour-and-a-half of cooking in favor of a frozen pizza in the oven, at least on occasion.

* Look at what’s left—and again, we can do this even if we have to steal time that we might prefer to use for another purpose. I love to woolgather in the morning before the family is awake, but that’s my best chance at a few hours of uninterrupted writing time, and if I’m focused on meeting my goals, I need to be thoughtful of what I do with pockets of time.

* Give yourself permission to regard writing time as one of those immutable elements, and place it on the schedule. For me, I might make the immutable writing time that pocket I regularly have from 6 to 8 a.m.—or I might know that I’ll be waiting out my kid’s karate class or sitting in a car line for a pocket of time. I suggesting giving a regularly available pocket of time to writing, and trying to find the best pocket available for the purpose. Sometimes we’re dealing with ten-minute increments, but sometimes we have the benefit of an entire unscheduled hour or more.

* Be both ambitious and practical about the amount of time you can dedicate to writing. If you can give eight hours to it, do! But that sounds like an unusual day to me, and the kind of overly ambitious planning that dooms a goal to failure.

* Because theoretical time has a tendency to disappear, try to identify a secondary time you might use for writing if your primary spot is taken. Mark it down, and if you find it’s necessary look for places to economize on time (the frozen pizza trick) and expand the secondary pocket.

Busy people really can’t count on writing time popping up accidentally, although waiting for (and recognizing) this kind of opportunity is sometimes my method. If we are to look back on the summer with the satisfaction of knowing that we made progress on our goals, we need to have the resolve at the outset to identify who we are and what we’d like to accomplish, and then to chart a course that takes the best advantage of available time.

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May I have several hours of your time?

Would you mind reading this poem and letting me know what you think?

What about this essay? This chapbook? This epic? This novel trilogy?

Writers often get hit up for advice. Writers who teach are especially targeted for this. We know the look—the hopeful smile when a student approaches us with a sheaf of papers and a request.

I used to sport that same smile. I remember asking every professor I had to read my work. They didn’t even have to be English professors. As an undergraduate, I was looking for praise. As a grad student, I wanted affirmation and further challenges. A lot of good people gave me a lot of good time—time they could have spent doing many other things.

And that’s really the issue. When we ask fellow writers to devote time to our work, we are tacitly asking them to devote a little less time to their own. This is something that instructors have to come up with strategies to deal with, or the demands can be overwhelming. But this is also something that all practicing writers need to think about—how to contribute to their community without taking too much time away from our own creative production.

When writers receive a request for feedback, refusing can make them appear unkind. What a requestor may not realize is how many people make the same ask, and how much time it takes to really do justice to a piece of writing—to read, to comment, to discuss. And obviously, quiet time is precious, particularly to writers who work or have families. 

Time spent with another writer’s early drafts is time a writer is not writing her own. It is also lost reading time, and by this I mean time devoted to reading finished, polished, published work—something that is impossible to stay on top of, although this is a task that every writer must try to do.

When the requestor is a good friend, we almost always make time. When the person is a friendly acquaintance, we usually find time for them, too. But often, the people who are asking for our effort—sometimes hours of it—are near strangers to us. As we progress in our writing careers, these people may be actual strangers, people who know us only from the page. 

We often hear stories of literary figures from the past who wrote to their idols for support. Major writers nurtured their protege pen pals, sometimes for a whole lifetime. There is precedent for the request, precedent for the generosity offered in return—in fact, many of our best-loved writers are people we know because a volunteer mentor held their hand in the early going.

I recently taught an introductory writing class with an aspiring fantasy novelist on the roster. The guy was prolific and dealt in every genre. Every week included a new request for feedback—a new story or novel chapter, a new essay or poem.

I am not a professor at this student’s university; I am an adjunct English instructor, the lowest-ranking and lowest-paid instructional staff member at the institution. I get about $2,800 before taxes to teach that student’s class, a cohort of twenty-four who write up to three drafts of five essays. I read and comment on their work, and I also plan for classes, have meetings, spend time on e-mailing and record-keeping, and more. I figured out that I make about $15 per hour before taxes, with no benefits, for the work I do. The student probably doesn’t understand that I’m not in one of those cushy professorships that conservative lawmakers always deride. I’m the working poor—like many adjunct instructors, undercompensated for my expertise.

I think it’s fair to say that I have more than the average amount of affection for my students, and I have unusually strong zeal for my subject matter. I don’t refuse a Composition I student who comes to me with evidence of his similar passion in his hand. So many of the goals of the class can be addressed through their creative work—matters like audience awareness, grammar and mechanics, development. 

What I have noticed throughout my teaching career is that students consider this kind of feedback to be part of an instructor’s job description. They don’t hesitate to ask, and they see it as evidence of their commitment to the subject they teach.

And they are right. A writing student who goes the extra mile—the extra marathon—to draft a novel is a very special person who has earned some extra attention.

As writers, I think we should be cautious about asking each other for time and feedback. I also think we should exercise a few strategies to protect our time when people we don’t know well ask for our assistance with their work. Here are some ideas we can do to keep other people’s writing from interfering with our own:

Set a target. A good community member gives back, and helping other writers in this way is an exercise in literary citizenship. So we might decide that we’re going to work with a certain number of writers—one a month, one a year, six over the summer, etc. Any ask received after that should be encouraged to try getting on our schedule the following year.

Set a price. If writers value our input, they may be willing to pay for it. We might try setting a price for our services as a way of safeguarding our time. If a mentoring relationship develops, we can rethink the money part.

Set a schedule. Can we afford to give the first Monday of every month to other writers? Let the requestor wait until then, and stick to that plan; don’t let the project carry over or linger, but instead do what you can in the time you allocate.

Schedule ourselves first. This is not what we learned in church, but it’s important to be a little selfish with our writing time. For a request that comes while we’re working on a project, we can simply say that we’re focused on that project, and that the writer should ask again in a few weeks or months. If we do say this and the writer remembers to follow through, we should think about making time for them.

Find a faster way. If a writer hands us a novel, there is nothing that says we have to read a whole novel. We can give feedback on the opening few pages instead. When we’re handed a poetry collection, we don’t need to give close readings to all of the poems; we can instead look at something like the way form operates over the course of the book.

Recommend other outlets. It’s good to have at hand a list of favorite coaches, local workshops, or online services that you can suggest to give the writer the help they need.

Say yes—mindfully. Although strangers and acquaintances are hard to accommodate, I actually love reading the work of my writing friends. Occasionally, I find that I’m so busy with my work and family life that this kind of extra project can fall by the wayside, even though I have the will to do it. Lately I have started to set deadlines for myself for those writers I agree to work with. I put deadlines for feedback on my calendar, and I ask each friend to give me a nudge if I forget. 

Say no. Some of us struggle with this, but it’s OK to refuse requests of our time and attention, and we don’t even have to give a reason. As writers, we need to protect our creative time, and it’s very poor form to miss a standing appointment with our muse. If we are serious about what it is we do, we have to put our writing first.

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On finding time to write

Most mornings, my writing session ends with a drumroll.

That’s how it seems, anyway, as small feet make their careful way down the stairs and then run—pat, pat, pat, pat, pat—to my spot on the couch.

When my little one comes to claim his morning hug, the writing day is over—so the trick is to get up early enough to accomplish what I need to do. The hug is the most important thing, but the writing matters a lot to me, too, so it’s always a difficult balance.

What gives, usually, is sleep—and I don’t see any way around that. Ambitious writing means earlier start times, and with a family, there’s very little wiggle-room on when the day ends. I can’t easily go to bed at 9 p.m. when there is a need for homework supervision and bedtime stories and my own work of course planning and paper grading.

Sometimes the issue resolves itself in a midday nap, when time allows for it. I’m not as effective as a writer as my day progresses, so morning time feels crucial. I like to write when I’m fresh from dreaming and my ideas are not polluted by media of any type (including social). 

There is some writing work I can tackle effectively in the afternoon. That’s a great time for administrative work, like submitting to journals or refining the order and contents of a book manuscript. I need my dreamy, contemplative self for composing, but my alert, midday consciousness is capable of getting work done.

An ideal writing day for me doesn’t happen at home. I need a retreat, and that’s something I do every two months or so—I escape for full days of writing and noodling and snoozing and writing some more. The best retreats involve at least three nights in some private lodging away from home and family, and I work hard to ensure that I’m all caught up with professional responsibilities before I go. Otherwise, the opportunity is wasted.

While home life doesn’t allow for ideal writing days, if I configure each day carefully, writing can happen. Here’s how:

The night before:

* Charge my laptop.

* Get the coffee pot ready to go. (I have a very sweet partner who does this for me every single day.)

* Get to bed as early as possible.

* Jot down those good ideas that come as I’m drifting off to sleep. It’s OK that I won’t be able to read my dark-room handwriting the next day; there’s something about the act of writing that cements ideas for me.

First thing in the morning:

* While still in bed, remember what I can of my dreams overnight—something I find very difficult, usually. My trick: Focus on the feet, and tense and flex the muscles there; then work my way up the legs, to the torso, the hands and arms, the shoulders, the neck, the head. Sometimes I can squeeze a dream out like toothpaste from a tube.

* Get up, press “on” on the coffeepot, and start writing by hand to maximize the mind-body connection.

* At some point, switch to the computer to get down the hand work while I can still read it, and to massage form, especially lineation.

* Welcome the cat’s intrusion. He’ll want a can of food, but then he’ll curl up beside me.

* Write a blog post.

* Get interrupted by kid feet. Cuddle the kid. Watch the news. Get everyone ready for the day.

After everyone leaves:

* Now it’s time for paid work—editing, teaching, grading. No matter how much of this I do, there is always lots more I can get to.

* Absently pet the cat from time to time.

* Grow drowsy and curl up for an hourlong nap, or be too busy to allow myself to get drowsy and curl up for an hourlong nap.

* If I reach a point where I’m caught up and focused, try the administrative work of being a writer and literary citizen.

* Do something political—make a phone call or write an e-mail to a legislator, for instance.

* Read a book. Take notes in the margins of a poetry collection in preparation for a review.

When everyone gets home:

* Do home stuff. Tickle people. Eat things. Wrestle with the cat, who will go too far and bite my wrist and get yelled at for it. Repeat.

* Jot notes as ideas occur for blog topics, poem snippets, essay ideas, submission opportunities, etc.—doing this keeps writing central, and writers have to have writing at the center to be effective.

* Equip kids with devices to buy some time for writing a book review and preparing for the next day.

* Avoid housework. Artists don’t do housework.

* Tackle “The night before” list, above.

It’s readily apparent that this is not how one writes an enduring literary masterpiece. Rather, this is a recipe for modest pieces, and these accrue, obviously—they become a larger whole.

Perhaps in a future post we can explore how the U.S. economy doesn’t allow people to live an artist’s life, which must include long interludes of navel gazing and cloud examination to be fully effective. My schedule here reflects a typical artist’s life—having to be very calculated to fit everything in, when “everything” includes hours of poorly compensated adjunct teaching labor, for me, or underpaid full-time teaching labor, or a job on the clock, or a salaried position that claims more than its fair share of would-be private time.

The good news is that we can get a lot of work done in the time that is available to us, if we look carefully at how our days are configured. A writer’s life is generally incompatible with a sitcom-watching life or an hourlong-pedicure life or a darn-your-own-socks life or a take-up-the-flugelhorn life. But nothing is off the table if we approach life deliberately and treat time like the holy and limited commodity that it is.

Will write for "likes" and shares

Publishing in a journal is a pleasure. Publishing a book is a dream. But publishing should not be the primary goal of the creative writer.

This statement may sound strange coming from someone who regularly maintains that writing isn’t finished until it finds an audience. But I can’t help but feel that we rush to find our audience prematurely sometimes—and that readers would benefit more from our sustained thought and our deliberative revision more than our speed of production.

Like most writers, I can pound out something pretty respectable right now. It’s no great accomplishment to write a nice little poem. As a former journalist, one of my chief skills in life is writing four to six competent inches that will inform or entertain an audience. I worked in a daily newspaper so small that on a few occasions I had twenty stories in an issue, some bylined and some not, all written from 7 to 10:30 a.m. I wrote; I found an audience. It was all in a day’s work.

But a newspaper is a product (albeit a disappearing one), and its value is in having lots of reliable information. Go to a whole day’s worth of county commissioner’s meetings on Tuesday, a school board meeting at night, and it’s not too hard to fill a front page with a simple record of what happened.

Likewise, a little poem can faithfully record some small thing—the news of the poem being that my son’s hand looks and moves like a starfish, or that I saw the reflection of my eyelashes in my coffee and thought I saw a spider. I can write about these moments, and indeed I have written about both. If I stop at these simple observations, a memorable poem might result.

A small poem that makes meaning of simplicity is a pleasure to read, and nearly all of my favorite poems begin in this way; a lyrical poem often has some moment of observation as its jumping-off point. The poems that feel the most meaningful to me move past observation to arrive at a deeper understanding, though. In Mary Oliver’s “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field,” that snowy owl is “beautiful, and accurate,” 

striking the snow and whatever was there

with a force that left the imprint

of the tips of its wings—five feet apart—

and the grabbing thrust of its feet,

and the indentation of what had been running

through the white valleys of the snow—

It’s a thing that happened, and she recorded it faithfully. Had the poem stopped right there, I would have felt rewarded by the reading. But Oliver goes much further, into the metaphysical—“the river / that is nothing but light.” She writes,

maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,

but so much light wrapping itself around us —

as soft as feathers —

that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,

and shut our eyes, not without amazement,

and let ourselves be carried [….]

It’s such a beautiful experience when art feels familiar, when it seems like it’s giving language to our own half-realized thoughts. This poem by Oliver expresses my spiritual viewpoint perfectly. This is my conception of life and death, and of what we become when we’re through with our bodies. I would not have had such an astonishing sense of connection had Oliver not engaged in deep reflection. I don’t know where this poem came from or how it evolved, but doesn’t it feel like the result of deep reflection in the moment of composition, on top of what feels like Oliver’s quiet, introspective spirit? 

A very small poem I admire a lot is William Stafford’s “The Little Girl by the Fence at School.” In only seven lines, Stafford offers a reflection on the nature of death. In this poem, the grass has one idea about forever and the sky has another:

THE LITTLE GIRL BY THE FENCE AT SCHOOL

Grass that was moving found all shades of brown,

moved them along, flowed autumn away

galloping southward where summer had gone.

And that was the morning someone’s heart stopped

and all became still. A girl said, “Forever?”

And the grass. “Yes. Forever.” While the sky —

The sky — the sky — the sky.

In so many ways, this small poem speaks for itself. The grass says “forever,” but the sky (the sky, the sky, the sky …) is an authority on forever, and it is noncommittal on the subject. While the poem takes up very little space on the page, it doesn’t have the feel of something that was dashed off. I just retyped the poem in less than a minute of time—so why does it feel like it took a very long time for Stafford to make it? But it does.

As I see it, there are two factors that point us toward the kind of writing that stays at the surface—that doesn’t reflect contemplation, that avoids deeper waters. One factor is a capitalistic system that forces artists to work for this week’s pay, rather than giving them space and time to create something lasting, or even eternal.

The other factor, possibly influenced by the first, is our rush to publish. The beautiful thing about publishing is finding an audience and completing the circuit from the deep understanding that happens in our notebook to the communication of that insight to others.

But we also rush for other reasons—to show our worthiness for employment, to fill a tenure file, to amass social media “likes” or shares, or to gain a higher stature as an artist.

I do it, too—I have no good reason to rush into publication except to share work and establish a little bit of a community within the relative isolation of my days—so I’m really preaching to myself here. I’d like to go deeper—maybe produce less, and maybe even end up with poems that are less pithy and that require more from a publisher. I think I’ll appreciate the results, even if I miss the instant satisfaction of the share.

Time to make time

I made a bold start today on a big writing project that I plan to tackle every day until it’s done.

It’s a prose thing, a work of some size, and I’ve had it on the back burner for a long time—after mothering, teaching, writing poems, and blogging.

Since my semester started today and I had to teach at 7 a.m., I got up at 5 a.m. to write for an hour and a half. I live less than a mile from the college, and I’m extremely low-maintenance, to an almost troubling degree, so this is very doable for me. In fact, I was so excited to get started that I woke up naturally at 4:30 a.m. and cleared the electronic decks of social media, e-mail, and the like. Once the coffee was done, I was ready to write.

Yep. I was ready to write … a very big book.

It’s hard to start a haiku. After seventy minutes of false starts, I am here to report that it is nearly impossible start anything of size in a small window of time.

I’m always harping on this—the great barrier our capitalistic society places on the artist, who has to fit creative work in on the side. It’s incredibly affirming and powerful to foreground our art instead, putting the act of creation first and tucking the minutes we need for everything else into the spaces around it.

But there’s a problem with my plan, and it is that the time I’ve allotted myself isn’t sufficient for thinking deeply about anything. That means we sometimes produce surface work that stays at the surface—and often beautifully so—but the surface is not the place of discovery.

A new president will be inaugurated this week, and now is a good time to think about the ways in which our political and economical systems put pressure on our art. This problem is unlikely to be relieved any time soon, if it ever will in the United States.

What can artists do, if putting aside a block of time isn’t sufficient?

Well, we could put aside larger blocks of time. But that means letting some things go—volunteer positions, enjoyable distractions, connection with friends.

Some things are more easily set aside than others. I have a very energetic social media presence, but I have cut back significantly since November of 2016. It helps that I don’t care to read much of what people are posting and discussing.

Likewise, I’ve been a huge newshound most of my life, but these days I don’t watch news shows on TV, and I take it in small doses on the radio. If it’s not on my hour or so of listening to Morning Edition, I allow myself not to know it, for the most part—although I still end up reading lots of newspapers and media posts online. Knowing is important, and staying informed is a hard habit to break.

I also have some hobbies that don’t much serve my art. For instance, I really love cheesy mystery novels—but I’ve been working on Feliz Navidead since Advent. I don’t even remember who navi-DIED, and I’m not sure I care anymore.

Our time has value, and almost every day we have to give it up for some form of commerce. In the next administration, wherever possible, I plan to hold on to it. I plan to keep my time, to maintain my focus, and, when possible and practical, to say no.

The Gift of Time

            When two writers live together, there is no spare time—there is only writing time.

            With a family in the mix, writing time is something only one person can do at a time. Let’s face it—someone has to help with homework and make a blanket fort and cook the meals and fold the laundry, all the daily stuff that ends up in the writing, and someone else gets to write, in those times when the other tasks can be handled by only one person.

            Sometimes it’s all hands on deck, of course, when it comes to the chaos of the household, and then no one gets to write. And then there are days when paper-grading and other professional tasks get in the way, and the needs of students and colleagues must come first. There are even days when it all has to happen at once—everyone has work to do, the house is on fire, the kids are naked—and then you juggle the best you can, making use of spots of time here and there.

            On calmer days, the writers in the home might get together and express their needs and desires. We might bend over backwards to give time to each other—that’s how we think of it, “giving time,” as if hours were valentines. And it’s a loving gesture, giving time—it’s more precious than money, to a writer, and more rare, and the lack of it is just as likely to cause stress and strain.

            It’s possible to go overboard with the divvying up of time, so that every spare minute is claimed for writing and those other tasks we do to clear the decks for writing to come later. Then the writers in the home run the risk of never spending time together at all—just scribbling or babysitting until one or the other joins the snoring partner in bed.

            When we have limited funds, we stretch our dollars with sandwiches for lunch and leftovers for dinner. We make do with the clothes in the closet; we entertain ourselves at home.

            With limited time, we write short pieces—poems or flash fiction. We think and plan while we scrub dishes so that we can use every moment that is gifted to us.

            Whatever it is we lack, money or time, we tighten our belts and do the best we can to share what little we have.

Chi and the Writer

            Keeping a clean house doesn’t come very naturally to me. Maintaining a constant state of clutter, though? I’ve made an art form out of that. I’m not even sure where the stacks and piles come from. One day the place is tidy; the next day, chaos.

            The denizens of my house spent this past weekend cleaning. I find that the eight-year-old is just the right age to run things here and there—toy to his room, dish to the kitchen, stray sock to the hamper. (This may be why I had one of those, come to think of it. It takes a long time for a kid to become useful!)

            A clean house makes me feel relaxed. It also prepares me to take on the next project. There is no pile of mail to go through, no trash or recycling to take to the bin. May as well write a poem, I figure, rather than, oh, watching TV and feeling guilty about neither cleaning nor writing a poem. Clutter puts everything on hold; we all move through the house in slow motion.

            I went through a period a few years back when I read everything I could about feng shui, the traditional Chinese system that directs placement of items within a space in a way that facilitates the flow of energy, or chi. A real commitment to feng shui requires a much tidier setup than I have on my very best day, so I gave it up as a bad deal—but the logic of the system sticks. Our own sluggishness inside a messy house makes sense within the terms of feng shui. Clutter stops flow, stops energy, and the negative energy builds in the places where it becomes stymied. A tidy house with a careful arrangement the items within helps all of us to ride a silver stream of chi.

            In terms of writing, the neatness feels like a boon—but the effect is so temporary for someone like me, someone who leaves literal paper trails, someone whose first move upon arriving home is to step out of her shoes in mid-stride, drop her pants on the floor, then work her bra through her sleeve and slingshot it to any corner.

            There is a question inherent in all of this. Is it a good writing strategy to tidy up before setting in to work? As much as I like the (now deteriorating) cleanliness, I did blow a weekend pulling it off—and that was a weekend I could have spent writing. What’s more, a clean and tidy house has a short half-life if I’m the one living in it. A weekend of effort is effectively neutralized by Wednesday.

            Like so many problems, money could solve this one. A regular hired housekeeper could take care of the cleaning, and that would allow my family just to tidy up—an easier job, but not a small one, by any stretch.

            And along those lines, full-time childcare would also free up some writing time. And so could an errand person. A personal shopper. A chef. An accountant. It would be lovely, too, not to have to go to work. Imagine! A person could wake up when she wanted, work when (and on what) she wanted, have fun when she wanted, and end each day relaxed. May as well add a massage specialist to the mix, while we’re at it.

            But in the world I inhabit, there are courses to plan and to teach, papers to grade, kids to nurture and to play with, meals to prepare, love to make, stuff to buy and repair and maintain.

            And there’s a mess, gathering even now, in my brain and in my house. From a writerly perspective, I actually believe it can be good for energy to stall and to tangle in the brain, despite the benefits of flow. I suppose letting a thought come and letting it go is a healthier way to live—but whatever would we write about? The poet’s mind needs clutter. I just wish I could work the tangles out on my own time, within the order of a perfect home.