One of the things I struggle with every day is whether "now" is a "good time for writing."
This is a problem that plagues my entire life, actually. Generally, "now" is NOT a good time for anything at all except, possibly, what I already happen to be doing. Yet, the thought process always begins with "Is now a good time to trim the dogs' nails / pay my taxes / mop the floor / wash my hair / work on my story?" and the answer is invariably NO. The daily life-support tasks always take first precedent, and anything that is in any way unusual always loses out to the dishes, making dinner, or giving the dogs their walk.
Frequently, I am paralyzed by indecision. I have many things I need to do, and it is not a good time for any of them. I don't have time to do even two or three of the things on my list, much less ALL of them. This means I have to pick one, and all the others won't get done. Inherent in that decision-making process is a value judgment: the thing I choose to do is more valuable to me than the thing I do not do. More importantly, the thing I do SEEMS TO OTHERS to be more important to me than the ones I don't do.
This leaves me terrified of NOT doing a thing that my husband, my boss, my friends, or my government considers important, lest they think I don't value that task, or worse, don't value THEM. I'm also afraid of beginning a task and then discovering I can't finish it, with the result that my day becomes completely derailed - for example, beginning to do my taxes only to discover that I have to get a bunch of statements from the bank, only to discover the bank here is closed, so I have to drive to Boston, only it's rush hour, and my whole afternoon is shot, and not only did I not finish my list but I ALSO didn't make dinner or walk the dogs.
The result? Do NONE of the items. Tell everyone I was too busy to do anything other than make dinner and walk the dogs. Thing that nobody can argue with, that we can all agree must be done on a daily basis.
What do I do instead, you ask? NOTHING.
That's right, nothing. I sit in my chair and refresh my email, or hide in the bathroom.
I can't tell anyone that hiding in the bathroom was more important than the thing they wanted me to do, because it isn't. To anyone, least of all me. This forces me to evade or lie if pressed on what I was doing. And I can't lie by saying I was doing anything that could be verified - I have to say I was doing some unnamed but important chore. That causes me to feel ashamed about not doing anything, which starts a guilt spiral that can ONLY be broken by urgency. That is to say, I can only get out of it by running out of time entirely. Then there's no more decision to be made. I just have to start dinner.
When nobody is home, for example if Ariel is visiting his parents, I might not ever "run out" of time, because nobody is waiting for me to do anything. I might not break out of the shame spiral until two or three in the morning. As I get tired at the end of the day, it becomes more and more difficult to escape. Only when physical exhaustion overcomes me can I go lie down and turn off the light. In fact, if I didn't have a job that I needed to be alert for, I'm not sure when I would go to bed at all. I might never. I might fall asleep at my desk, for all I know - I've never tested it (and I never will, because that would be stupid).
Because writing is a thing that I want to do, ME and JUST me, I am not accountable to anyone but myself. It is easier to disappoint myself than to disappoint anyone else. After all, I can't give MYSELF a disappointed glare, nor can I refuse to talk to myself, or refuse to pay myself (not true, actually - I often don't bill clients out of a sense of not deserving their money because I didn't work hard enough, but that's another issue). You might be able to see where this is going, but I'll finish the thought anyway.
If I use my normal criteria, writing always loses the argument about whether it's a good time to write. There is always something more important. ALWAYS.
I have to acknowledge that, because I have to internalize that there is never going to be a good time to write, period. I will never be able to finish all my work so I can write guilt-free - after all, a woman's work is never done (boy, is that true). I will never have nobody waiting for me. I will never be perfectly ready and creative and rested. There will always be something waiting that I'm putting off in order to write.
I have to be okay with that. I have to be strong in my determination to publish a novel, and aware that that might require writing MORE THAN ONE, and definitely will require sending mail and e-mail and making trips to New York to visit publishers and God only knows what, and that there will never be a good time to do any of this, ever.
This started out as a discussion of whether it is better to write in a short chunk, or whether I should attempt to carve out long chunks. It's certainly more satisfying to sit down and bang out a whole chapter in one sitting, but it's also really hard to grab that time. Writing in shorter chunks is easier, but produces a choppier result. I was intending to write up pros and cons and then pick a strategy.
I have instead convinced myself that this is just another part of my "good time" thought process. Another attempt to convince myself not to write, because I don't have the right amount of time to write in. What nonsense! It takes me a fraction of a second to type a letter, only a little longer to type a word, less than a minute to write a sentence. How silly of me to think I don't have enough time to write!
I don't know if it will help to think that way, though. There IS time lost when sitting down to write, in finding my place and remembering what I was doing. Functionally, ten minutes is actually not enough time. I will get frustrated. But four hours is tiring, and the result of a marathon writing session is a burnt-out writer - I don't pick up the keyboard again for a couple days after that. I have heard from too many places that writers must write every day to be willing to make any decision that will cause me to write only once or twice a week.
I'm also a little worried that marathon writing sessions cause me performance anxiety. The longer I have set aside to write, the longer it takes me to start. And the more excited I am about a topic, the harder it is to write it. I don't want to be disappointed. I don't want to discover I'm not good enough, or not as good as I thought, not good enough to break out.
I think, I'm going to seize any chunk of time that is at least half an hour in length, but ideally one hour. I don't think I will let myself write longer than an hour, even if I'm on a roll. That might sound stupid, but I think if I make myself stop, I will be excited to start again, and that will cut down on the lost transitional time. Longer than 90 minutes and I begin to be physically uncomfortable and I don't want to associate writing with being tired and in pain, nor do I want to worsen the aches in my fingers.
That will probably create choppiness, but you know, I don't think choppiness is my biggest problem. Shay has only commented on it twice, ever. If I do write choppy work, it is both easy and fun to fix it. I like editing. I like fixing problems when it is clearly better. I think I've lost track of that.
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