In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 268.
A few weeks ago I was on a flight from New York back to Colorado, where I live. Like so many seatmates before him, the guy beside me told me that A) he has a crazy uncle that I should totally write my next book about, and B) he would write a book, if only he had the time. Time was the only thing missing from his project, which also suggested I had written books because I must be rich in this resource.
Like many annoying things, there is some truth in this equation. I spent (and therefore must have had available to spend) some hundreds of hours writing and revising each of my books; in the years I have been an adult, a significant amount of my time has been given to sentences and paragraphs. Not to mention all the other aspects of writing that matter—from mentorship to practice to suffering to dreaming to trying and trying and trying—have happened in space and time. So, dear 32B with your fascinating uncle and your overfull life, I guess I do write novels because I have time. But it’s not quite so simple as that.
When I think about the most productive stretches of my writing life, they are also the busiest. I wrote a whole draft of my first novel in the same ten-week grad school quarter in which I wrote two short stories and taught and attended classes; I finished a different novel draft while homeschooling two kids in the first spring of COVID-19 when I also had so many students in each of my Zoom classes that I couldn’t see them all on one screen. The old adage “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person” comes to mind. In these stretches, the electricity was always on in my brain. I had no room to procrastinate. I have written on airplanes, in coffee shops, in my parked car, on hotel beds. I have written novels with babies, little kids, and big kids in my care. I have written while working full time, at nap time, and on the sidelines of middle-school ultimate frisbee games. I have dictated lines on my phone and added notes to my notes app while walking the dog.
I am not complaining, nor am I bragging. This is what life is. I write because I am a human person in a beautiful and weird and awful and particular world, and my life is an expression of this fullness. This fullness is the place from which everything that matters both lives and grows. This fullness is why I write, but it is also what makes the writing hard. Your version of the treadmill and the to-do list is different from mine, but too-much-to-do-not-enough-time feels nearly universal. What if “enough” for writing time was smaller than you might assume? And what if the fullness of your life is part of your writing?
All the aspects of my life need to share space with one another, and therefore I only have thirty or sixty or ninety minutes to write on most days. Almost always, this small stretch of time could easily be eaten up by the list of essential daily tasks. This is not time I have, but time I choose. It exists in a big, messy mix with the love stories, the heartbreaks, the planning and scheming and the all-encompassing lists. This mix is limitless, but I must put a small fence up each day around a tiny plot of it, and this is my writing time.
So far, I have not been offered a private turret or a chateau in which to write. So far, I have not been offered a staff to feed me and rear my offspring while I write. So far, I have not made such vast sums on my mid-list literary fiction to be able to quit my day job (weird, I know). If I sit down most every day for a whole hour with no distractions, I will write lots more novels in my lifetime. In fact, I bet that I will write more and better novels that way than if I had the turret and the staff and all the hours in the day because I have to fight for this work, and to mean it.
So, to 32B: I don’t want to write about your uncle, but you should, and you totally have time.
Ramona Ausubel is the author of three novels and two short story collections, including The Last Animal (Riverhead Books, 2023), which was a national bestseller and won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature prize. She teaches at Colorado State University.
image credit: Kenny Eliason
