Time and the Writer
Time. Aspiring writers complain they would write “if only” they had the time. Daily life can be crammed with distractions, deadlines, and too much to do, ironically often coupled with feelings of isolation. My favourite fantasy used to be ambling down a tree-lined avenue, quaint with wide lawns and Victorian houses. A neighbour, raking leaves, waves. Another invites me up the veranda for coffee. On the main street, every shopkeeper knows me by name. In the lakefront park, I watch sailboats and fishermen pass, and leisurely scrawl the first few pages of a new poem sequence. Evenings while away, civilized and social, as friends chat around the crackling fire. Yet, in this relaxed and genteel state, I produce two brilliant full-length books a year….
Really?
We have all sorts of techniques to squeeze in writing time. Inspirational books, such as Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, encourage free-flowing our words anywhere, any time, to be edited later. I believe my best work arose from experience that long eddied in my mind’s backwaters, before mingling with need to find its way onto paper.
Poets require time alone to marvel and wonder, to make the new a part of ourselves. Composing at odd hours or in non-literary places like a busy coffee shop may do the trick. On the fly, key snatches of poetry into the cell phone for later. Post sticky notes on the dashboard or bathroom mirror. Meet a contest deadline. Set a quota—five lines of poetry per day often spills into more writing. Turn inward and focus the right brain on a key word or image, trusting the powerful subconscious to draw the rest to the surface. The simplest advice I was ever given was this: Don’t wait for writing time to appear. With a sweep of your arm, just clear your desk and begin. The cardinal rule: never let an idea or phrase escape. Trap it online or on paper before the words poof away forever.
Finding time can start with mere minutes. Revision is a whole other matter: a black hole swallowing hours and hours.
However, if our writing is to reach beyond the confessional or avoid shrinking into poems about writing poems, while we love our solitude, we can’t live in a vacuum, any more than Stelco can forge steel out of air. We need time too to pit ourselves against the day’s hurly burly for the creative friction the push-pull generates.
Working on a complex project changes time in yet another way. Gradually more oblivious to the surroundings, we sink within to a secret place where imagination rules. There, a mesmerized timelessness replaces the clock. Outside, the minutes and hours spin, but within this authorial concentration, we know only a single extended moment of creating.
Switching back to clock time can be a delicate process. Like a deep-sea diver resurfacing, it’s wise to rise slowly, or risk a psychological form of the bends. And any person who interrupts a writer at work—beware! Though the head nods, and the lips mutter, “Uh huh,” and “That’s nice”—or worse—the glazed eyes and inability to frame a complete sentence betray the empty puppet pretending to be human.
For me, writing time comes down to a state of mind. To enter it, I go to, or dream on, places that signify borders, symbols of separation of one form of life from another: the shore, twilight, cliffs, windows, and—because they belong nowhere, but are always moving between—buses and trains. In fact, years ago, I purposely took long trips on the subway to help draft a series of short articles. Whether I laze on a beach or take a few minutes at home to remember my foot dipped in the water, I slow the action. I absorb, not do. What Brian Moore termed the “ruthless” observer, mentally I distance myself from the hubbub. Once refocused, from that fresh angle, there is time to find new ways into meaning.