Over
the years, my writing day has atrophied and burgeoned and contorted to make way
for my life. At one time, a writing day meant taking my children to a
babysitter and coming back home to my desk and sitting down without any
distractions but the changing song on my Pandora station. I made myself a
little ritual with a blended coffee and the quiet of my usually loud place
allowed me to write. That was when I was
pursuing my MFA and people saw how seriously I took writing.
There
is this perception sometimes that writing isn’t a serious profession and maybe
that’s because it’s largely unpaid. But it as serious a profession as one makes
it, even without a paycheck. We can throw ourselves into the craft of writing
as much as a person throws themselves into staying late at an office,
overbooking an Outlook calendar, and catching up on emails. One is not greater
than the other because of its fiscal returns. One is more reasonable, maybe,
but those of us who are writers are not known for our reason.
It
is hard to describe a typical writing day because many days I don’t write at
all. There are days for housework or submitting my existing work or the jobs I
toil away at so I can continue to write. There are days when I go for a run and
shower and contemplate what I will write next but never open a Word document. I
count all that as part of the process, too. By the time I sit down to write, I
have spent hours mulling through what I have to say, spinning words in my head,
erasing them, writing them again without ever seeing them on a page.
As
much as I admire the people who wake up early or stay up late each day to write
on a schedule, I am not one of them. My discipline is not in the time I set
aside to write but the regenerating motivation to. The actual time I spend
ass-in-chair is parceled out into large or small chunks as life allows.
I
have learned now to write amidst distractions—which I never thought I’d be able
to do before—out of sheer necessity. I know now it is my necessity to write—it
is my brain’s yoga—so if the only way to write is in the chaos of two
screaming, wrestling boys, that’s what I’ll do. Right now I am typing on a
laptop in the back of a coffee shop. I get my writing time in where I can fit
it. I have written a poem on a pumpkin patch field trip, made a story outline
in the grocery store aisle, and crafted an essay on the bench next to the
inflatables my children were jumping on.
I
have a desk, but my writing day could be anywhere. The words get put typed into
documents at my desk, largely, but they are put into my head and then notebooks
wherever I am. Today I didn’t think I’d finish writing this, but after each
iced vanilla latte, I returned to this computer to finish what I started. I
think that is my regenerating motivation: to make something whole any way I
can.
Holly Pelesky is a
lover of spreadsheets, giant sandwiches, and handwritten letters. Her essays
have appeared in The Nasiona, Jellyfish Review, and Homology
Lit, among other places. Her poems are bound in Quiver: A Sexploration.
She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska. She cobbles together gigs to
pay off loans and eke by, refusing to give up this writing life. She lives in
Omaha with her two sons.
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