So how much time do you spend writing every day? I started to answer the question but wandered off down a side alley and didn't come back to it in the conversation. Instead I came back to it in my journal. How much time do I spend writing? I have no idea.
I know my Morning Pages can take anywhere from 20 minutes to more than an hour – but how do I count up the rest of the time, and what actually counts as writing? When I committed to writing every day, I specifically excluded Morning Pages from the definition because it would take something truly cataclysmic for me to miss a day of those.
So what counts as writing?
Do we include my long rambling e-mails? I can easily lose (or use?) an hour writing to Eileen or Sue. I can lose more writing long much more personal e-mails to others than don't even get sent.
Blogs definitely count, and poems, and creative prose pieces. Tweets even, because I try to be a little bit creative there too.
But do we only count the pen to the paper, the fingers to the keyboard time as 'writing' – or do we include every time I reach for a notepad when I'm walking, or scribble on scraps of paper or magazine margins when I'm reading? Do we count the ideas that go nowhere or only those I pick up and run with? What about the thoughts I have in the early hours of the morning, that sometimes, only sometimes, get captured and nurtured? Do we count the lines that I recite in my head over and over as I wander through the woods on the days when I have no pen or paper, but have stumbled onto an idea that I think might work? Do we count the 15 minutes waiting for a train when I free-write what I can see around me, or the hour(s) on the train even though I may only manage three or four coherent lines?
What counts as "writing" – and how would I total up the fragments of my days? And am I honest? Does it count as double-counting if I were to add in what I'm doing now, which is essentially typing up from my journal thoughts?
When it comes down to it, I don't count at all. I don't count the minutes or the hours. I don't count the words, unless I'm writing for a submission that limits words or lines. All that counts for me is the answer to the very simple question: have I written anything today?
It doesn't matter how good or indifferent or utter rubbish it is. If I have written today, then I won't be able to answer those questions until tomorrow or next week / month / year in any event. The only commitment I have made is to write every day. Not saying I honour that commitment 100%, but I feel bad when I fail.
Not 'bad' as in 'guilty'. Not 'beat myself up must try harder' bad. Just 'off kilter'. My day is incomplete if I haven't found a small corner of it to string words together, and weave sentences into spells, or spin yarns of ideas. Whether it is a single tweet, or a heartfelt meditation, or a ramble round my ideas pool, doesn't matter much either. What matters is that I practiced the craft. I put words on a page. I got ideas out of my head and into a place where I can contain them for a while, look after them, nurture them into something that maybe later I will want to release into the wild.
~ / ~
Tuesdays seem to have become writing-focussed days. I am up early for the Co-Writing Workspace where we gather as women from around the world to celebrate the written word, and each other, and simply devote 90 minutes to allowing ourselves to write and to talk about writing. I use the word 'allowing' advisedly, because the word 'permission' comes up quite often in these sessions. It seems we have to give ourselves permission to write at all – never mind to write freely, to write frivolously, to write seriously, to write to remember, to write to release so we can forget, to write to keep the business moving forward, to write about the business of living a free and creative life. To write.
From around the country and around the world, we gather and hold space. We ground ourselves in our willingness to put the pen to the page and be open to where it leads. We have learned how comforting it is to look up from a page and see other bowed heads working on we know not what, and mostly will never know, because we do not need to, and not all of our spiders' webs of words are for sharing, some are safety nets for us alone. I think we're all a little surprised at how important these Tuesday mornings have become as part of the rhythm of our writing week.
And then, some weeks, I move from that technological global link up, to a smaller group. Men and women in the room, and (mostly) out of the room – as I join a Creative Writing Outside group. Technically, it is a series of courses, but as many of the participants return again and again, it feels more like a 'group'– or even a collective. My word for it, garnered during the summer season, is a 'gather-in', which I've decided is one of the collective nouns for poets. We walk marshland and farmland, and out to the sea. We sit and stand and feel the weather and the seasons. We talk (and listen) to trees and rivers and insects and birds and the land and the sky. And to each other. And we write.
We write poems, and stories, and reflections, and prayers, and protests, and celebrations, and nature notes, and weather reports, and link things that are to things that were or might be or could have been or have been lost. We write to prompts and urgings. Or we ignore them. We write tiny details or grand sweeping vistas. We keep going back, and we keep writing.
I come away from these days with half-formed things, and completed things, and maybe things. Whole poems and 'just openings'. I sit on a station platform and scribble. I ride from the sea back to the city and scribble. And I get home and have so many squabbling bits of things fighting it out in my brain, that I have to fire up the laptop and start to allow one of them its head, to see if it can become something.
All of this feels important to the writer in me. These Tuesday "hours and hours" that are almost wholly given over to writing, or fuelling the writing, or reading about writing, or talking about it. When or if either of those two groups ceases to be I will need to keep the process alive – to have this one day in the week given over entirely to my creativity.
The rest of the week is less intense. Journalling is a given, and this weekly post is a commitment, but otherwise, things come and go as they will. All that matters is that at some point I pick up a pen, or sit at a desk, or pull my laptop onto my lap, and get out of my own way and see what wants to be said.
I'm not a novelist. I don't need to think about plot and character. Not yet, anyway. I've even put short stories away for a while. For now I'm writing about what I see directly in front of me and I have no reason to try to control how it wants to express itself. And sometimes I think that the 'writing' part of that, even the 'editing' part of that is the smallest piece of it. Like flowers and fungi, I suspect most of my writing happens under the surface, when even I don't know what's cogitating, formulating, collating, waiting to emerge when the conditions and the time are right.
How many hours a day do I spend writing? A better question is: how few hours a day do I not?
