Do You Have 10 Minutes to Write Today?
For people who miss writing
Many of the greatest writers I know don’t write a lot. We get together and complain about it. How long has it been since everyone finished a good project — two months? Ten? How long has it been since everyone even sat down to write? It can be a shocking amount of time. A lot of the best writers I know probably haven’t touched a keyboard in months. A significant percentage of these non-writing writers are women.
We don’t know how to do it. We don’t have enough time. We don’t write because there are so many things in the world that feel more important than writing, like parenting, or doing the paying work that keeps us from the kind of exploratory creation that might not lead anywhere. Writing — real writing; the kind great writers do — offers nothing that could justify your immediate life decision, being a writer.
A great writer I went to school with confessed to me years later that she couldn’t write because it had been so long since she wrote anything good or publishable, she didn’t feel like a real writer any more (at the time she was working in a beer factory). It had been so long that she didn’t feel she could start. It would take too long to re-learn the tricks that writers use to fool themselves into being writers: the right cup of coffee, the right mindset, the describable view out the window that confirms that you’re the right person to be doing this.
One of the reasons writers apply for writing retreats is that places like Banff Centre or Yaddo or any one of these are spaces where someone, even an anonymous advisory board, has given them permission to just be a writer. As a marketing copywriter I was once given an office with a nameplate that said “Writer” on the door, and that was the most that I ever felt like a real writer. No one else in the company had one.
A few years ago when I was stuck finishing a book project I came across The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (great title!) The author, Julie K. Norem, illustrates a surprising comparison between procrastination and perfectionism. Perfectionism is an evil we know well as writers: it’s a force that keeps us from letting go of our brilliant work. But procrastination just looks like laziness. Many people even self-identify as procrastinators, saying they work better when they leave projects to be completed under a last-minute deadline.
In the book, Norem, a psychologist, explains that perfectionism and procrastination are rooted in the same problem: the fear of failure. Describing a procrastinator who sounds a lot like the non-writing writers I know, she writes, “She would much rather have people think of her — and she would much rather think of herself — as scatterbrained or overcommitted than as more fundamentally incompetent. In her mind (and, she hopes, in the minds of those who work with her), the fact that her proposals are often successful, even though she rushed to get them ready, serves to prove how bright she really is.”[1]
When many of us avoid writing, I think we are really saying that there cannot be enough time or talent or inspiration for us to do the job we’re capable of doing in our minds. Instead, we do the laundry or bake a cake. (Procrastination baking can serve an important therapeutic role when we are finishing up projects, but it’s not helpful if it is keeping you from writing in the first place.) Or we take up work that keeps us too busy to do writing.
The thing about being a writer who doesn’t write is that it takes so much more energy from you in the long run. You can skip writing for a day or a month or a year. Catch up on that five-year-old Netflix show. But sooner or later you’ll fall apart in the face of your own tremendous failure. If you’re like me, that means that of a Sunday afternoon, you might find yourself questioning all the life decisions you’ve made so far, but really you’re just mourning your own absence from yourself, a writer. It’s much easier to write, if only for a little bit at a time. Writing, like sex and yoga, is something no one ever really regrets having done voluntarily. But you’ll always regret not writing.
So start small. Your writing doesn’t have to be good or long. It doesn’t have to be anything. Can you write out the words, one hundred times, “I hate writing”? Chances are, at some point, the next sentence will diverge, and you’ll go on to write something more original.
I often start off new writing classes with this exercise: We are going to write for 10 minutes. If you don’t know what to write, start with describing the clock. (There usually is one, in an institutional setting.) Do you think it’s a good clock? If you were going to design a clock, would you have designed it differently?
And that’s really all writing is. Putting down words on paper. My school friend’s lack of productivity bothered her, so I asked if she could just spend ten minutes writing in a notebook. Not to show it to anyone. Just to get back the comfort of being a writer. My friend’s biggest problem wasn’t time — it was that she hadn’t given herself permission to be a bad writer before becoming a more successful one. So, this is my advice if you’re a writer who isn’t writing.
All writers have only one thing in common. They write. The only thing that people who aren’t writers have in common is that they don’t write.
So, do you have ten minutes to write today?
[1] Norem, Julie K., “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking.” Basic Books: New York, 2001 (79)
Love this!!!