What Changed My Writing Life
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.”– Annie Dillard
Friends,
I first came across the above quote while in college, when Annie Dilliard’s, A Writing Life, was required reading for our senior seminar. As burgeoning writers, we loved soaking up all Dillard’s talk about writing being like sitting up with a dying friend, that a writer’s life was “colorless to the point of sensory deprivation.” Yes, this was the wonderfully dramatic lot of the writer: destitution and genius. And I ate that angsty crap up with a spoon.
But the talk of schedules? Not so much. It wasn’t sexy enough. Did Hemingway have a schedule? Surely not. He made love and fought bulls and wrote masterpieces. He wasn’t fiddling away with his Daytimer, meticulously plotting out the hours of his day like some Scrooge-ish Stephen Covey. No, in my mind, writing was too mystical and divine to be contained in something so mundane as a schedule.
But then I grew up and joined the real world. I realized that being a writer wasn’t nearly as melodramatic as I wanted it to be, but it did in fact benefit greatly from this concept of “a schedule.” Five years ago, when I first decided to resurrect my writing practice, Shawn and I sat down and established a family schedule that carved out about 4 hours a week for my writing. And for a couple of months, it worked. And then another baby arrived and his work load got more demanding; hence, my writing time disappeared. Then, we had the discussion again. And again. And again.
What I began to realize was that if I always saw him and our children as the gatekeepers to my “writing time,” I would walk around feeling bitter and powerless for the rest of my life. I needed to find my own net for catching days. It was time to create a schedule that was dictated by me.
Friends, I am being completely honest when I say that this practice changed my life. In fact, it’s still changing my life. As soon as my days begin to feel unmanageable and my goals start going unmet, a half a second of self-reflection usually reveals that I’ve allowed my personal scheduling practice to fall by the wayside.
Of course, “a schedule” looks different for everyone. For me, it means having a rough outline of what I’ll aim to do each hour of the day (ie. 6am-yoga; 7am-clean kitchen/shower; 8am-get kids ready and to school…) It’s a glamourous life, I know. Once I’ve plugged in all the “must-do’s” on my schedule, then I look for empty pockets that might present themselves.
For instance, this very moment as I’m writing to you, I hear my children in the kitchen, jamming out to Johnny Cash, and loading the dishwasher with our after-dinner mess. It’s noisy, yes. And, yes, sometimes I have to break up fights about who takes the compost bowl out. But this is the treasure of time this day presented to me, and I’m taking it. I’m filling my net.
And I’m learning what always needs to be filling my net. And it isn’t just writing. Because as we’ve talked about before, we are more than just one role or one gifting. And attending to all the parts in equal measure is important.
So, what exactly are these parts that I’m alluding to?
Next time, my friend.
Till then, keep writing.
Maile
