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In the summer of 1825, Nathaniel Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, moved back to his hometown of Salem, Massachusetts, and went about the business of becoming a writer.
From 1825 to 1837, Hawthorne maintained a strict schedule where, each morning, he locked himself in his bedroom to read, and write, and stare at the wall.
He destroyed most of what he produced.
Malcolm Cowley, a literary critic and Hawthorne’s contemporary, said that Hawthorne’s routine at the time, “seldom varied.”
“Each morning, he wrote or read until it was time for the midday dinner,” Cowley said, “each afternoon he read or wrote or dreamed or merely stared at the sunbeam boring through a hole in the blind and very slowly moving across the opposite wall. At sunset he went for a long walk, from which he returned late in the evening to eat a bowl of chocolate crumbled thick with bread.”
Hawthorne wrote steadily, eventually publishing a collection of short stories, followed soon after by a novel, the Scarlet Letter. He also held down a day job, accepting, in 1836 for instance, an editorship gig for a publication called the American Magazine for Useful and Entertaining Knowledge and, later, a job as a weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House.
He married, had three kids; a full life. He was never not writing, and working, usually in the same day.
Hawthorne was good buddies with Herman Melville, the guy who wrote Moby Dick. Once, Melville sent Hawthorne a letter in which he complained about not having enough time to write.
“I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances,” Melville wrote. “The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose, — that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar…
…What I feel most moved to write…will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches. I’m rather sore, perhaps, in this letter, but see my hand! — four blisters on this palm, made by hoes and hammers within the last few days.”
Melville, too, held down various jobs, including one working on the Erie Canal, and another as a clerk at the New York State Bank, a job for which he was paid $150 a year.
Like Hawthorne, he was writing, and working, all at once.
And, like Hawthorne, he published. Loads of stuff. Even though he never quite had the “calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,” he found a way to do the work, much as we do, today; office managers, and mothers, and teachers, and husbands. We do the work, furtively, in between things, in stolen moments: during our lunch hour, or on the subway, or late at night, or when the baby goes down for a nap.
When it comes to chasing our dreams, many of us don’t have the luxury of a calm, of “the coolness,” and yet we persist. We get it done.
Except for me, yesterday.
Yesterday, I didn’t get it done.
And for some weird reason, I thought I might never get it done.
Heart pounding in line at the grocery store, I found myself wishing I didn’t have to spend time on things that aren’t writing. Some days are like that, do you know what I mean? When you, despite your best intentions, can’t seem to get to the page, when you can’t steal moments, at least not ‘enough’ of them?
Those days are the pits.
“Every day includes much more non-being than being,” Virginia Woolf once wrote. “This is always so. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; washing; cooking dinner. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger.”
And that’s how it goes: life, creating stuff, life, dreaming, life, honoring your calling. Good writing days. Bad ones. Cooking dinner. The broken vacuum cleaner. The whole thing is tangled up and messy and beautiful in its own way — and this is how it has always been.
It’s important to remember that.
After I got home from the grocery store last night, after I was done feeling sorry for myself, I did some math. I figured out that, since I started telling stories back in 2008, I’ve written about three million words. Most of those words I put together in ways that are forced, and amateurish, but others are okay, and sometimes even make me proud. ‘Three million words’ equals a lot of stolen moments. Those moments add up. They mean something. They amount to something.
They amount to a creative life.
It’s a little after four in the morning as I write this. I got up way early. I won’t have a repeat of yesterday. There will be some non-being today too, of course, because there always is.
But at least I can say that, on this particular day, I’ve gotten off to a good start.
