Time To Write
by: Rachel Cline
I recently spent a weekend in the country with three other writers. We are each at different points in our careers, but all of us are undeniably serious and competitive. Writing that sentence, I wonder if any two writers in the history of time have ever been at the same point in their careers–do you think? Of course we are told and told and told, and indeed we know (in that ignorant way we know everything, oh smart us!) that comparisons are odious. What others think is not the point. The writer’s life is not about publications, or reviews, but only about “the work.” So instead we ask one another, “Do you have time to write?” which can only mean, “are you writing more than I am?”
Pursuant to that question, I have spent most of my adult life at least half-swallowed by fantasies about quitting my day job, lowering my cost of living, moving somewhere on the verge of rural, and taking in copy editing as a way to get by. In truth, I don’t think I have ever visited a city, town, village, or vale, where I did not briefly imagine myself in a small but well-ordered room, finally fulfilling my potential by writing all-the-motherfucking time. This is surely why, on Sunday, my companions and I looked at the real estate postings in the quaint little town we were visiting and pretended to buy houses, or swap apartments for houses
–Think of the winters. How silent it must be.
–I love winter. Imagine the solitude!
We ate lunch at a sidewalk cafe and eyeballed the locals. Doubts emerged:
–I’m afraid in a place like this there might not be anyone for me to talk to; that I’d never go on another date.
–But you could be the Sylvia Beach of Blanketytown. You could start a reading series… you could create tableaux vivants!
–But then I’d never get any work done.
–Good point.
We walked the length of Main Street and failed to find a supermarket.
–Well, so one would have to have a car. For groceries, anyway.
–Not sounding so cheap all the sudden.
–Unless we had a collective car. Like, instead of the Brooklyn Writers’ Space we could have the Brooklyn Writers’ Car.
–In exile.
But riding the train back to the city, besotted with the view outside our windows, the fantasy returned:
—But the point is this: to have this hour and whatever of complete nothingness every day. This sense of forward motion with no effort.
—And the light!
—Two thousand words round trip. Easy!
I have even done it—quit my day job. Well, I got laid off, in truth, but I negotiated what seemed at the time like a massive settlement ($20k?) and shortly thereafter signed a decent contract for my first two books. Still, I don’t recommend it. Time became elastic and meaningless. As long as I had deadlines, and payouts, it was manageable but as soon as I didn’t, I was a constant millimeter from abject despair (not to mention financial ruin). And I never wrote for a whole eight-hour day or even a six-hour one, not once.
In fact, the only time I’ve ever pulled off a six-hour day was when I had no responsibilities beyond the biological (i.e., while residing at the form of heaven known as Yaddo). My conclusion therefore is that what “time to write” really means is “a wife.” Do you have a wife, or, failing that, a mansion with staff? No, I do not. I buy my own groceries, carless; and do my own laundry, and am responsible for organizing my own entertainments. Not that I resent any of that, the real problem is that after sitting in a chair all day at my work-desk, I can’t bear the thought of sitting at my home-desk, or even lying abed with the laptop on my chest.
Also I can’t write while drunk—because there is the second abiding writers’ fantasy: I will wear my trousers rolled and consume vast quantities of any substance I want and people will think I’m a genius!
You see, I actually have very few illusions left about literature as a way of life. My only remaining fantasy of any vigor is the one in which my third book does for me what my first two could not, just like The Corrections did for Jonathan Franzen. But maybe Dr. Franzenstein is not my best role model. I should be imitating Lionel Shriver—she is not asking other people if they have time to write, although she does seem to have moved house a fair amount… Well, then, Caroline Leavitt—she’s written at least ten books in the time it took me to cough out two while not changing her domestic circumstances and she still finds time to make new friends on Facebook… Suddenly, every successful writer I think of conforms to this model. Does Jane Smiley spend her weekends mooning over real estate transactions in river towns? Stephen King? Judy Blume? Can you picture it? I cannot.
So maybe there is no such thing as time to write. After all, I have no children, I don’t eat much, I own my apartment (mostly), and I love to do laundry (unlike most novels in progress, it has an ending.) Maybe when I say “time” I’m a liar and when I say “wife,” I mean conferrer of permission, legitimacy, and belief; I mean writing teacher who never goes home and doesn’t much care about grammar; I mean mother who applauds when I take a step without falling; I mean purple unicorn.
Does any writer not struggle with their own failure to be the productive genius dreamt of when teenaged and credulous? And aren’t all of us that very person, briefly, transcendentally, between paragraphs? That is the time to write. It’s all the time there is.
Rachel Cline’s third novel The Question Authority, was published in April. She has written non-fiction for publications including the New York Times Magazine, Tin House, and Self.