What my writing day looks like depends on the season.
The cycle my life follows is teaching for eight months, writing for four
months. My writing day begins on May 1st and ends around August 31.
It would be more accurate to say ‘my writing half-day’. Much as I admire and
envy those writers who can work for hours, through the night, even, I don’t
have the concentration or stamina. I reach a breaking point after about four
hours at the desk. I can feel the work devolve, grow sloppy. Lose intensity. A
knock-it-out-of-the-park writing day for me is a five-hour stretch. I work on a
reward system; a four-hour bout is respectable. If I achieve that I allow
myself to do something fun, like go for a walk, or to a thrift shop. But after
my writing day I must also return to my job which, even though classes aren’t
in session, carries through the summer months. Student supervision, hundreds of
emails, letters of reference to write. And the increasingly challenging
endeavour to read. But those things are outside my writing day. Let me
re-focus. Focus has never been my strong point; this issue impacts my writing
day.
I can
think of my writing day, then, as a pyramid of diminishing focus. The apex
happens around 9:30 am, after I’ve guzzled at least two cups of coffee but am
still in that vaguely woozy post-sleep state. I’m not yet wearing my
self-critical hat, but rather letting my hair down, letting the sentences go
sideways, giving myself permission, enjoying what Stephen King, in his terrific
book On Writing, calls the “inspired
play” of the craft. He means this in a good way. At the pyramid’s tip of my
writing day, I’m kinking my verbs, pushing past the predictable – or failing at
it better than usual. I might even invent a few new words or terms. I’m in my
happy place and don’t care whose birthday Facebook has just been announced, or
what weather the day is likely to bring. I’m not even really inhabiting my
body, and that’s something I love about writing; it affords me an escape from
my body. Many writers I know feel, when writing, deeply embodied. But it’s the opposite for me; the only part of my body
I’m aware of, at the writing desk, is my hands. Typing. (I don’t write longhand
unless forced to, like, in an airport, or on a bus.) And my eyes, tacking
across the screen along with the words.
By
noon, I can feel the slide down the pyramid begin, can detect the energy,
focus, and concentration descend from the peak. I begin to check email when I
pause to search a word in an on-line thesaurus. I do stretches on my floor mat;
these should help me re-focus, but they don’t. They situate me back in my body.
Email situates me back in the world. The writing-desk spell is breaking down. I
wish I was capable of longer bouts at the writing desk, but I’m not.
Thus
far I’ve said nothing about the physical conditions of my writing day. There
has to be white noise, a fan whirring the whole time. I keep wearing what I
wore to bed. My hair must be pinned back off my face with a claw-clip. The heat
has to be cranked. I need to be really warm when I write; maybe it’s to melt
away the edges of my body. Not great for the electrical bill or the
environment. Not to mention my Macbook Pro, buzzing away for big chunks of each
day. Right now, my writing desk is crammed in my small bedroom in the
undisclosed location where I’m writing, so I just have to stagger out of bed
and over to the desk. Three steps. I like it this way. If I had to trek outside
to a writing-studio shed behind my house, in my back yard, I might never go
there.
Genre
informs my writing day, too. I’ve been referring mainly to prose composition so
far, and if I’m in the early drafts of a novel, I impose a word quota – not an
uncommon practice for writers of long prose, I’ve heard. It makes me feel
productive, like my hands twitching across the keyboard have achieved something
tangible even while the logical side of my mind, what remains of it, knows I’m
seven or eight years away from a finished novel. During my writing day, it’s
not uncommon for me to check the ‘word count’ feature on my computer. The nerd
factor. Poetry feels less productive, paradoxical as this may sound, since its
tonnage is lighter than a novel or other long prose work. If the poetry-writing
itch comes over me, it helps jumpstart my poetry-writing-day by reading – other
poetry, or non-fiction, mostly. But if a riff doesn’t arrive in the first hour,
I’m sunk. Or if I have a riff but nothing to hook to it, nothing generative in
play. I hate those days; I feel like a washed-up writer on those days, and I
don’t know what to do with myself.
Genre,
yes, that’s what I was on about just now. I can’t read fiction while writing a novel.
Entering another writer’s fictional world has the potential to sabotage my focus
on my own story’s world. Therefore, if it’s a fiction-writing day, I dive right
into it; ideally, I’ve been inside my characters’ heads during the night, which
is often the case, in the interstices of sleep.
So
now we are nearing the bottom of the pyramid; my writing day is drawing to a
close. It’s probably about 1:00 or 1:30 pm. I’m let down that the focus and
that special ‘buzz’ needed for writing anything remotely worthwhile, isn’t
there anymore. It’s like that old Gordon Lightfoot song; the feeling’s gone and
I just can’t get it back. I have to wait until the next day, fill the waiting hours
with teaching-related work, or meals, or sleep, or drum lessons. Even though my
writing days are restricted to one-third of the year, they are golden, they are
bliss; I know I’m lucky to have the May to September period relatively
uninterrupted to devote to writing projects. When the ‘back to school’ stuff
begins to appear everywhere, I want to cry. There’s a period of mourning for my
soon-to-be-gone writing days. But I’m lucky to have my teaching gig – I learn a
lot – I get to talk about writing. I enjoy my students. Talking about writing
isn’t as good as doing it, but it’s pretty okay. And I know I’m fortunate to
have a job that keeps me thinking about writing for those eight months of the
year when outside the pyramid. And when the days begin to lengthen, sometime in
March, and more light creeps in, my crusty heart stirs – if I can hang in for a
few more weeks, my writing days will return, those slow, daily slides down the
pyramid of diminishing focus, inside the planet’s big, diminishing clock.
Jeanette Lynes’
second novel, The Small Things That End
The World, is forthcoming from Coteau Books in 2018. Her eighth book of
poetry, Bedlam Cowslip: The John Clare
Poems, received the 2016 Saskatchewan Arts Board Poetry Award. Her poetry
recently appeared in the on-line poetry journal Juniper. Jeanette directs the MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.
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