Writing? You Need Less Time Than You Think.
There’s a belief that balancing rest and play with your work is actually good for your writing practice. Henry Miller, in his self-directed 11 commandments of writing, addressed the need for a balance in a writer’s life:
· Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
· Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
I have an exercise that I ask my students and OneRoom members to try: schedule out your typical week. Include time for eating, sleeping, exercise, reading, napping, working, taking care of the kids and/or pets, and that elusive idea of “play.” Once you have written down all time blocks needed for a typical week, what time is left for writing?
The result of this exercise, often ends in a realization that there is very little available time for writing — a realization that can cause panic. The assumption behind this panic is that a productive writing life requires a part-time or even full work week dedicated to writing. This isn’t true. In fact, most practicing writers only write for 1–4 hours per day, and often in smaller chunks.
Most practicing writers only write for 1–4 hours per day, and often in smaller chunks.
So how do these writers do good work in so little time? They knew how to rest.
In his book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang provides the work/play/rest schedules of dozens of successful writers across centuries and nearly every schedule includes two chunks of one to two hours each day for writing, followed by some sort of exercise and, blissfully, a nap. Included are writers who also worked full time at what we now call a day job: mother-writers such as Alice Munro, scientist-writers such as Charles Darwin, banker-writers, clerk-writers, and the more glamorous hedonist-writers.
In my own limited experience as a practicing writer, I’ve found this need for rest ring true. Writers can only be productive and effective for a limited time of the day, and the intentional use of the remaining time in the day can help to service better writing habits. Exercise. Naps. Sleep. And as Henry Miller put it, keeping human.
Writers can only be productive and effective for a limited time of the day, and the intentional use of the remaining time in the day can help to service better writing habits.
To balance all of this practice and rest and sleep and keeping human, writers must be aware of how and where they allocate their time. To make the case for time awareness, Pang cites a group of violinists who were asked to guess how they spent the hours in an average week. The best violinists could estimate quite accurately how they allocated their time. Pang argues that this ability proved, “A sense that their time was valuable and needed to be spent wisely.”
This time-awareness is just another way of acknowledging that our time on this planet is limited and precious. If you relegate a small section of your day to writing, you’ll find you get much more work done and your creative brain will keep working even after you’ve continued on with the rest of your day.
Laura Scott’s writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Okey-Panky, No Tokens, Tin House’s Flash Friday, Monkeybicycle, and other publications. She serves as managing editor for Lavil: Life, Love, and Death in Port-au-Prince (McSweeney’s/Verso 2017), and is the head coach at OneRoom. Find out more here↓
