What Can You Do With the Time That You Have?

Thoughts on productivity in small spaces as we enter November. And a few links.

A guest speaker, author of a wealth short stories, poems, and creative nonfiction recently visited the creative writing class that I’m taking this semester. She had a lot of stories to tell about screenwriting in Hollywood that were interesting yet not wholly relevant to my personal writing goals, but at the end of her talk she said one thing that really stuck with me.

Okay, to be fair, she said this one thing in response to a very specific question that I asked. But it was a great answer, and it sparked today’s newsletter.

Tara Stillions Whitehead, the guest speaker at my class, had been talking about how she manages her writing time, citing the inherent difficulties with getting two elementary-aged children off to school each morning and balancing home life with working as a professor at a local university. It was what you would expect from anyone highly prolific in a demanding stage of life: she wakes up at 4 AM and writes in predawn peace before the rest of her family breaks her busy silence.

So it was with some timidity and a little embarrassment that I asked, “Did you always manage to write so much when your kids were really little? How did you stay productive when you had toddlers at home?”

And she said, “I didn’t.”

And I, dear reader, didn’t realize how much I needed to hear that.

I am at a stage of life where I will soon have two small children (oh, surprise! If you didn’t know, baby #2 will be joining us next spring!), a college education still slowly grinding along, a brand-new house to settle and unpack (oh, yes, we just moved! more on that in a bit!) and a lot of angst about having neither the time nor the brainpower to do much writing.

Hearing such a simple acknowledgment—that this is a hard and busy time, and will by nature not allow for as much creative wiggle room as other periods of more rest and ease—from an experienced, widely-published writer was grounding. Reassuring. Realistic.

“If I wrote at all, it was mostly flash fiction, in tiny doses,” she went on. “If I had thirty minutes, I’d write something for thirty minutes. And that might be it for the day. That was what I had room for in those days, so that was all I did.” Her first full-length book was not published until 2021. (More on this author and her work can be found here.)

The funny thing about this advice? It wasn’t new. I’d heard it before, I’d said it to myself before.

But in busy times, we forget.

I actually wrote about this very concept— doing what little we can in the tiny pockets of time we have—back in February 2018 when I was working two jobs and finishing a certificate at community college. In those hectic days, I found comfort in a quote dubiously attributed to Teddy Roosevelt: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Doing what I could in terms of writing looked like composing thoughtful emails to friends and jotting down ideas for blog posts—and for that season, it was enough.

(You can read the full 2018 piece here, at my now-mostly-defunct blog.)

So now, here we are! It’s 2022, I have a small child who occupies most of my waking moments (and another one on the way), a new house to organize and maintain, and an education to keep up with. (Slow though my going may be, I’m determined to graduate with highest honors even if I’m 45 when it happens. You can hold me and my GPA to that.) I didn’t write anything at all in August, and I didn’t write a newsletter in October because we were in the act of moving house. But here we are at November, I’m out of the woods of the first trimester (am I in the clear yet? good) and I’m feeling cautiously optimistic about writing again.

(If I ever write a memoir, I’ll probably call it Cautiously Optimistic. …Or maybe Too Many Parentheses. Gonna jot that idea down real quick and call it creative accomplishment for today.)

November is a month of tremendous accomplishment for many writers, because it’s National Novel Writing Month: a 30-day challenge in which published and aspiring writers attempt to write 50,000 words toward a novel manuscript. I participated for two years when I was in my late teens (and had a lot more time on my hands!) and though I don’t have the time or the get-go to write 50k on any project this fall, the siren call of the virtual writerly conclave still beckons to me. I want to be in on the fun, darn it, even in my own small way.

So my goal for November is to write 200 words every day. Small potatoes.

The thing about small potatoes, though, is that once you have a few, your appetite is whetted and you want more. Usually when I sit down to write 200 words, I end up writing 250 or 300 or on and on. But getting over the hurdle of do-I-have-enough-time-to-write-anything-right-now can be as simple as setting the bar low and telling myself I can always jump higher.

200 words a day for November, and they can be anything I want them to be. Maybe some of them will land in your inbox. Who knows?

Before I close, the meager writings I put forth in September and October!

My Attention Span is a Mess, and Here’s What I’m Doing About It (self-published on Medium)

Responses to Give When People Ask When You’re Going to Have Another Kid But You’re Not Ready to Tell Them You’re Pregnant Yet in The Belladonna Comedy. This was my public pregnancy announcement (I’m ready now, as you can see) and I had a lot of fun writing it. Don’t ask nosy questions about other people’s family planning! If you have to inquire to get information, it’s not your business.

There was a lot of screen time in our household as we got ready to move and I battled early-pregnancy nausea. I refuse to feel guilty about this. But I could go for some more literary fare.

Also, we’re drowning in acronyms over here.

And finally, why I write fiction (most of which has never yet seen the light of day, and I’m fine keeping it that way)….

Did you set writing goals for November? Have you ever had to tactfully deal with nosy questions from people who don’t know you very well? You can hit reply to this newsletter in your email to send me a private response, or leave a comment on the web version— I’d love to hear from you!

Until next month,
Amy

P.S. From the archives…

Reasons Why Every Female Character On This TV Show Must Be Very, Very Thin in The Belladonna Comedy (from 2021)

Edgar Allan Poe’s Very Deliberate and Very Meta Writing Process for the Spookiest, Most Angsty Poem Imaginable in The Victorian Lady’s Column (from 2021)

(I didn’t write anything in October 2020 because I was busy having a baby. In other news, my son is TWO! This effrontery of aging threatens to continue every autumn until I am in my grave. I will be writing the calendar a Strongly Worded Letter.)