The Grasshopper #14, Time
How much does it take to write and where do you find it?
When I decided to look at time and writing, I had two directions to go in. On a practical note, I see writers wrestling with finding time and energy to write on a daily basis, which is really the only way to improve. But the other aspect of time in writing is the use of moving around in time in your writing.
I recently read Anthony Doerr’s recent novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, which is textbook on how to use radical shifts in time to thread together a big story. It’s an amazing book, an ode to story, books, and libraries, all of which were formative to me growing up. And he completely pulls it off.
Finding Time to Write
The two kinds of time you need
Actual writing time, and time when you can focus. This is all about routines, a not particularly interesting topic. But routine is an essential element of writing, especially in the long term.
Establishing a routine is essential to learning to focus because a routine is a recipe for getting your mindset into writing mode. Routine are rituals which we have polished down into a set of steps to prepare us to enter an altered state.
Because writing is an altered state.
This is a favorite topic of mine and it applies equally to both nonfiction and fiction. As we’ve learned from recent research into psychedelic and plant medicine therapy, set and setting are critical. The phrase ‘set and setting’, coined by Timothy Leary, may be his only useful contribution to that powerful therapy and it applies equally to being a creator.
Set is your state of mind, your mindset, going into that state.
Setting is the actual physical surroundings you are in when you are able to enter that state. Choosing a setting is a part of the routine or recipe you develop to get to writing mode. Setting is also why finding a consistent amount of time and an actual amount of time that you can stick to is important.
I am not going to tell you when you should write. But I will suggest that you prioritize it and make sure others know to leave you alone.
Alone time is the key but it is not found by entering a monastery. I can feel perfectly alone in a crowded place if no one is bothering me. It’s not entirely about absenting yourself physically from other people. It’s about going into a state where you can stretch a little, write bad stuff, have a conversation with yourself or an imagined reader.
A lot of writers find this by getting up early, before there are distractions. Others go to places where they are simply alone in a crowd. The primary thing is to construct a chunk of time daily when you will not be interrupted. That takes discipline on your part and those in your life.
You need a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. I can’t tell you a magic formula for finding a way to hang it up, but you have to do it.
When I started writing this yesterday morning, just as I was getting going, my phone started beeping with text notifications. And, because there was something I was dealing with besides this, I checked them. But as soon as I did I knew that I’d lost the thread and I had to set it aside and come back later, like now.
Now for the interesting stuff, time and writing
You are now, temporarily, a god (or goddess)
I recently read a piece by Joan Didion about Hemingway’s style and his eventual loss. I have come to Didion late, not really paying attention until she died and the New Yorker and other publications began surfacing the work she had done for them.
At first it was hard for me to follow her syntax, the way she moved from sentence to sentence and from a moment in time to another, seemingly randomly. But after reading a few things they started to flow in their own unique way and it became a little easier. There was a different kind of logic to it, a glimpse into the writer’s way of sorting things out in their head as they came in.
Time may seem sequential but that is just something humans, at least Western humans, created to create structure. We like things that follow order, like the numbers on a clock. But that is a very limited way to deal with time and it is not the natural way our minds evolved to the schedule of planets, sunlight, and orbits.
Those things are the physical organizers of time. Writers who rigidly follow these circadian rhythms are limiting themselves. Often they write procedurals, work that moves in numerical order from one moment to the next, like instruction manuals or how-to things.
I started out as a professional writer writing exactly that kind of stuff, six books worth. Step by step guides. They are pretty important when you are learning something like electrical wiring or basic business skills.
But that is not the kind of thing I read, except if I need to wire an outlet.
My story mind is not linear, and I seriously doubt yours is. Even when I’m writing an observation about politics I tend to follow the pattern I followed, in my mind, as I sorted facts and ideas and tried to get my arms around them.
Learning to transfer that internal process to the page was the point where I finally felt my writing was getting somewhere.
I know a writer, an acquaintance, who writes about rock music. He affects a hard-boiled film noir style, and it reads so gimmicky that I find his writing unreadable. It is not, I think, the way he thinks or processes things. To be blunt, it’s fake.
He is not moving forward as a writer. I have no sense of time in his work. It is a failure of imagination or, simply so foreign to the way I think that it is like another primitive language, borrowed culture.
Cultivating style is a way bad idea when learning writing. We all do it. The way we represent time in our writing has no rules, it is not subject to the will of the rising and falling light or the calendar.
I’m not saying break or ignore rules or the cycle of the planet. Just find your own way to express your experience of an idea. Go outside of time when it is the right thing to do.
Just don’t think about it too much.
A little tale about time
“There is a story of a group of Tibetan traders many years ago who were traveling from central Tibet to China to trade, a trip that could take a year there and back. On a mild fall day they stopped in a wood to make tea. One of them decided this would be a good time to meditate so he wandered off, found a flat rock and went into samedhi.
His friends, when they noticed he was missing, yelled for him and searched but were unable to find him. They assumed he had fallen into a gully or been eaten by wild animals and moved on.
A year later they were returning and found themselves in the same wood. They decided they should look for his remains to bring to his family. They came upon him sitting on a rock in samedhi and called to him.
He woke up, looked around, and said, oh, is the tea ready?”
Paraphrased from Reflections in a Mountain Lake by Ani Tenzin Palmo.
Tenzin Palmo is a Westerner, a Brit, who in 1960 at the age of 19 read about Buddhism and decided she was Buddhist, despite knowing almost nothing about the religion. She met a Tibetan of the Karmapa sect, Chogyam Trungpa, who went on the become a pioneer in bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the US.
When she encountered the Karmapa tradition she was struck by the sudden conviction she was a Karmapa. Within a year she had traveled to India and met the leader of the sect who by now was an exile from the Chinese. She immediately recognized him as her longtime teacher.
This caused a problem for him, though he completely acknowledged she was indeed a student. The problem was that she had incarnated as a woman and there was no place for her.
He advised that she go into a mountain village and find a retreat. She ended up spending a total of twelve years meditating in a cave, then founded a nunnery for young girls to become ordained Buddhist priests, something unknown in our times, though there was an ancient tradition.
Today the nunnery thrives and many young women have become ordained. Tenzin Palmo’s story is told in the above referenced book, one that has had a profound impact on me. In it she tells her story to Western audiences while raising money for her nunnery.
It is one the best books on basic Buddhist and Tibetan thought and practice, and a damn good story. Highly recommended.