Getting something down

My writing books. Most with unbroken spines.

Having recently left my job to pursue writing “for real,” I’m finding myself with an unprecedented amount of free time. Seriously, the last time I had more than ten days off in a row was in 2001, when I was laid off over the summer (and I spent those entire three months worrying about the fact that I was unemployed and looking for another job). Before that, it was the summer after my high school graduation, good old 1996.

A few things are taking some getting used to. For example, the feeling of being unsure what to do with my time. When I was working, I mostly spent my weekends and evenings in a state of uneasiness, knowing that I only had X hours free before I had to go back to the grind. This made Sundays especially un-fun. I didn’t want to waste the afternoon reading a book or watching a marathon of America’s Next Top Model (yes, I admit it) on TV because that time could potentially be better spent. The same excuses applied to cleaning the house (much to my loving and eternally patient partner’s chagrin). Better spent how, I was never sure, and often the “better spending” turned out to be wasting time on the Internet or wandering around the house with a misplaced sense of purpose, sure that I had something important that I should be doing. Then, oh look at the time, Sixty Minutes is on already? And the next day was the start of a brand new week. Yep, Sundays were the worst.

I’m getting over that. Hours stretch in front of me like big empty highways. I find myself indulging in some of those previously denied self-indulgences (but not cleaning the house just yet). But the anxiety over wasting my precious little time seems to be morphing into another that’s probably just as unhealthy—the overbearing feeling that if I’m going to be a writer, then I should be writing, damn it.

I’m working on it.

This afternoon I realized that I have an awful lot of books on my “writing shelf” that I’ve never read. Some were texts for college classes that I skimmed or only read selections from as the assignments required; others I picked up on a whim because buying books about writing made me feel more writerly. (This is still the case, but now I can claim them on my taxes!) Since I suddenly find myself without a steady income, I’m going to try reading through some of the books I already own before I buy any new ones. Today I cracked The Right to Write by Julia Cameron, which I’m pretty sure I bought at a pretentious Haight Street gift shop soon after I moved to California, nearly ten years ago now. It looks brand spanking new.

I’ve read through about three chapters so far, and although it has a new-age vibe that’s not quite to my taste, it’s not as if I’m wasting my precious time by reading it. After this will probably come Creating Character Emotions by Ann Hood, followed by Elizabeth Benedict’s The Joy of Writing Sex, which I always secretly loved having on my shelf, if only to shock visitors who scanned the book spines. I think I read a chapter or two when I was in college and sex was the only thing I could think of to write about. (Back then, I probably didn’t need the book!)

The exercises in books like these are usually good—or at least useful, since they make me stop procrastinating and actually start writing—but my favorite part of reading writing books is when I come across a passage I can completely relate to. It’s like having a conversation with someone you don’t know that well and being surprised to realize that you’re both on the same page about something entirely random. (“Hey, you’re a closet Sims addict?! Is Mortimer Goth a big jerk to all of your characters, too?”) Since just this morning I was (internally) bemoaning the fact that my novel revision is making me slightly insane and I want to take a little time to work on something else, but don’t know what—with my brain switching into “OMG I’m wasting precious time!!!!” mode—I found this passage in The Right to Write particularly comforting:

“Writing is about getting something down, not thinking something up. Whenever I strive to ‘think something up,’ writing becomes something I must stretch to achieve. It becomes loftier than I am, perhaps even something so lofty, it is beyond my grasp. When I am trying to think something up, I am straining. When, on the other hand, I am focused about just getting something down, I have a sense of attention but not a sense of strain.”

My logical side already knows that this is true, but it’s easy to forget. (My irrational side usually wins in a power struggle.) I’ll keep it in mind tomorrow morning when the blank page is jeering at me.