Every Day Is Saturday

By Steve Pease/Michael Chandos.

 

     I’m a day late with my blog because I don’t know what day it is.

 

     When you have a job, you have structure, and your day is defined by that structure. On Monday you get up at 5 or 6 to drive to work, on Saturday and Sunday, you don’t. You bowl on Tuesday, eat lunch with your office section on Friday and gather for a beer after work. You pack a lunch every day, you exercise or go to the gym, you watch Monday Night Football.

 

     When you retire from the J.O.B or from work (a four letter work ending in K), most of the structure goes away. “Every day is Saturday.”  Projects around the house, decluttering, irregular exercise, watering the lawn, (YAWN) and maybe some writing. None of that will get the writing job done. It can become a blur.

 

     Here’s two tall tales about writers. Stephen King in his must-read book “On Writing” describes his writing day as up early, writing for four hours WITHOUT INTERRUPTION, lunch, then business in the afternoon (ie no or very little writing, but often editing)   

 

Writing and editing are different functions and should be separate.

 

John Stith, mostly an SF novelist, when he was working, got up at 4 am when the house was quiet, wrote til 5:30 or 6 when the family got up, and that was the writing for the day. In retirement, he still gets up early and reserves the morning for writing. He struggled to find the structure to frame his day, and, finally, just did it.

 

     That’s how you start. Look at how you write, how your day is built, how your head works and chisel out time to write when it’s best for you. Are you a morning person? Afternoon? (not me) Make a CONTRACT with yourself of when the writing occurs. Enforce it! Train your mind to look forward to those hours and reward it by showing up to work.

 

     For me mornings are best for exercising, house work, cutting the lawn, maybe email. I don’t like afternoons.  I want to nap and sometimes do (not over an hour). I do business, I might edit, pay bills, walk the dogs. Go shopping, start dinner.  My writing time starts around 7, maybe 8, and goes to 1 AM or later. Little editing, that’s afternoon work.  Creative work only during those hours. It works.

 

     Make writing a habit. Tell your head when Writing Time is and make sure you show up. Your creativity will show up too.