In
On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing
Life That Lasts,
Ann Kroeker and Charity Craig ask this question: To what extant have you
arranged your space and time to honor your writing?
I
joke with my wife that Billy Collins is one of two poets
in the United States who makes a living from poetry. When she asks who the
other one is, I tell her I can’t remember.
Expanding
from poetry to writing in general, how many novelists actually support
themselves by strictly writing? Likely more than you find in poetry, but it’s
equally likely that the number can be counted – it’s not huge. James Patterson.
Stephen King. Some romance writers.
The
number is finite and knowable.
For
the rest of us, we likely write whenever we can cram in a minute or 30 minutes
or an hour. I write whenever I find a moment to write.
I've told the story of how my first
novel, Dancing
Priest, came to be written. for the first
four years of its existence, it resided inside my head. Initially, I never
intended to write it down. It started with a song I heard, and the image of a
priest dancing on a beach. I developed the story as a mental narrative, and
delved deeper into it once I started biking. A number of scenes in the novel
were created and elaborated while I rode Grant's Trail in St. Louis.
I was also doing a lot of traveling,
including a regular monthly trip (sometimes more frequently) to Alabama.
Airline flights and nights in hotel rooms afforded the time for writing. Two
hotels in Oxford, Alabama, provided the physical space for the writing of
Dancing Priest from 2004 to 2007, the mental and physical narratives
overlapping during this time.
I started writing the story down in
the fall of 2005. Hurricane Katrina, and getting my mother and aunt out of New
Orleans, had something to do with it. Perhaps it was seeing the destruction of the place I was born and grew up. Whatever it was, it was Katrina that
spurred me to starting writing the story down.
I immediately discovered that
thinking a story in my head was infinitely easier than writing it down. The
mental narrative included images – what the characters looked like, the
settings, even the weather. The written narrative had to account for these
things in words. The time required multiplied exponentially.
So I crammed it in whenever and
wherever I could – early mornings, late nights, trips. There was no set time,
because I was also a husband, a father (and soon a grandfather), a church
deacon, an editor, an occasional freelancer – and I had (and have) a full-time
job that, like most jobs, is something more than full-time.
So to answer Ann's and Charity's
question, I have no regular time to write. I have only what becomes available,
or what time I can make available. So far, that "schedule" has
allowed the creation of two published novels (Dancing Priest and its sequel, A Light
Shining), the non-fiction book Poetry at
Work, this blog, a weekly column at Tweetspeak
Poetry, and occasional article for The High
Calling. Come the spring of 2015, the time
available will radically change – I'll be retiring form the day job sometime in
April or May.
But
there’s a second consideration to that question asked by Ann and Charity – the
idea of honoring your writing.
I
could come up with a longwinded answer, but I think it’s tied to the time
devoted to writing – I honor my writing by making the time for it.
I’ll
ask you the same question – how do you find the time to write, and how do you
honor your writing?
Photograph by Holly Chaffin via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
