Writing Ain't Like Raking the Lawn

Ask any writer and you're almost sure to learn that the chief frustration in her or his life is not the effort to get published or writer's block.  I would bet it won't be lack of ideas or struggling with an ending or a character they can't love or any of those challenges that most writers know come with the territory.  Instead, the primary frustration is finding the time to write.

Mind you, just as Einstein told us, time does not exist as a separate entity.  When writers say they need time, what they are actually saying is they need time and space.

Sometimes non-writers will tell us, "Well, you've got some time...go ahead and write."  The time they are referring to is perhaps 30-45 minutes and the space is filled with distractions.  Writing ain't like raking the lawn.  It's not something you can pick up and put down in 20-minute intervals.  

Personally, I'm primarily a novelist.  It takes me at least 30-45 minutes of sitting quietly with the manuscript before I can hit a single keyboard key.  Next, I'll need at least an hour more to accomplish anything at all, but it's actually in the subsequent hour to that one that I'll probably write a paragraph or two that I actually like.  So, ideally, I need 3 or 4 hours dedicated to uninterrupted writing to make me feel like I'm not doing it half-assed.  Given that amount of time without a television on, meals to prepare, dishes to wash, laundry to do, phone calls to answer, other people's problems to solve, crying kids or barking dogs outside, day job concerns, or nearby fireworks/shotgun blasts and I can actually work on the novel.

People often ask how we writers find the time.  The answer is we often don't, or if we do it is expensive.  If you tell someone, "I can't make it today, I have to work at my day job," they'll have no problem with it.  If you tell someone, "I can't do that right now, I'm writing," they'll often get angry.  This is largely because many people see writing in the same way they see any hobby.  So sometimes we decide writing is too expensive in terms of our friendships, but then we resent being made to choose.

However, to someone who is serious about writing, it is not a hobby or a pastime.  I'm not going to be melodramatic and say something like, "To us, it's like breathing."  It doesn't quite rise to that.  If I stop writing for a couple minutes, I won't pass out.  Still, it's not just a hobby.  For those of us called to write, it is a fundamental element of how we self-identify.  It's a cause of which we are a part.  We are activists of the written word; whether successful or not, we are driven to communicate, to entertain, to provoke.  We are the conveyors of ideas, perpetually lost and happiest in the what-ifs.  

Worse than knowing in advance we won't be able to write on a given day is when we plan to write, reach the very mouth of the cave of our imaginations, and then we are called away.  We tell ourselves, again and again, that we'll hold sacred some time to write.  We make resolution after resolution, telling ourselves that from now on we'll write at 4am or four hours every other day, or all day on Saturdays.  However, life gets in the way, and we seem unable to protect the writing time.

I mean, I can still write with limited time and with all the distractions, but it'll be something less...like a blog entry.