Time to Write
A couple of days ago Elenya commented about work encroaching into all aspects of her life, leaving her little time to write and sending her to bed each night mind-numbed with exhaustion. (Elenya, I hope I paraphrased you more or less accurately. :))
We’re all there or have been there. I am very grateful to have arrived at a point in my life when I can call myself retired, but the truth is I am ineligible to apply for my meager pension for two more years. As you know this was a forced retirement, sparked by my job ending but also by a strongly felt need to get my writing career to wherever it’s going before I get too much older, and enabled by my family’s support, bless their little blue-eyed hearts. My share of the household expenses has fallen on to them. And I have no fun money any more, am just wearing my old clothes and when not writing I’m digging into household and craft and scrapbook projects that I had bought all the materials for because I had the money but never got round to doing because I was working. I do miss buying clothes and shoes and purses and jools and whatever I like from Amazon and iTunes. And I don’t get to travel much. But the gift of Time is worth (almost) any amount of relative poverty. It’s a dream come true. Right now I consider myself very, very fortunate.
In the past, though, I managed to do bits and scraps of my own writing all through two very paper-intensive majors in college, through a graduate degree that I ended up completing in one year to save food, lodging, and travel money, through full-time, part-time, half-time, and on-call work, through raising Chica Jr. and stressing through Faramir’s long illness in the mid-nineties, at lunch breaks and on airplanes and buses and in cars (when I wasn’t driving, natch). I was writing the way most of my friends are having to, whenever they can grab a chunk of time. (Except Peachy, who I believe is a journalist and so writes full-time professionally. In that case creative work becomes a busman’s holiday, which is a whole ‘nother story.)
I wrote twaddle, drivel, nauseating poems, one of those first-novels-in-which-you-disgorge-all-your childhood-issues, and other stuff that I am in denial I ever wrote because it was so effing BAD. Sometimes I’d get inspired and write all night long, but mostly it was in what-the-hell trickles. Sometimes I went for a year or two without writing anything. (In the midst of my most recent dry spell I dreamed that my head had been surgically cut off and replaced. The replacement didn’t "take" and I felt myself fading away, just as I woke up.)
But along with the aggregating years, by fits and starts the words accumulate. Somebody, either Ray Bradbury or someone else, is said to have said, "The first million words you write are crap." I think it took me many more than a million words to cross the CRAP/NOT CRAP line (I am a hard learner). And then it got easier to shape things out of words and have them do what I wanted them to do.
So I guess my point today is that life has to be lived, rent paid, housework done. You have to go to school, feed yourself and your family, go to parties, spend holidays with the rellies, and on and on. What makes you a writer is writing what you can, when you can. I used to beat up on myself for not meeting some unrealistic goal I set myself. I see now that all that junk I wrote was putting words into my saving-toward-not-writing-CRAP account, where they were accumulating interest all along.