I haven’t needed to set an alarm for the past 6 years. My 6-year-old and 4-year-old are frankly alarming enough first thing on a morning.
More reliable than a farmyard cockerel – and significantly less patient for the first sign of sunrise– my children have made sleeping in a much more longed-for goal in my life than getting up early.
Liminal Moments
As a writer this is frustrating. Everyone knows that the good stuff is best harvested in those liminal moments between sleep and wakefulness. Over the years I have daydreamed about being the first to rise, to sit at my desk by lamp and candlelight, sipping tea and getting words down on the page.
Instead, my ‘early morning’ writing shift has been held after school/childcare drop-off. This is a much harder space to defend from the demands of daytime life – both internally and externally. On ‘good’ days I’ve struggled to stick to my allotted writing time, run over and then run behind with just about everything else in my day. More often than not, the overwriting in turn leads to my not showing up the next day, to ‘make up’ for work I haven’t done. In turn, this leads to breaking my writing habit. Once broken, it just gets easier to not show up and harder graft for me to re-form my daily writing process. Usually, at the point I’m back into a rhythm with my habit, there’s sickness somewhere in the family, or schools out for summer. Another pothole in the already uneven writing journey.
Loyal and constant companion
I’ve always taken this approach with my writing though: The urge to write isn’t going anywhere. It has been my most loyal and constant companion my whole life. I don’t need to worry about whether I am or I’m not a writer (spoiler alert: I am. Second spoiler alert: You are too). My job is to find a way to support that urge and let the writing have at the page. That’s the job I do for myself. It’s the job I do with other writers, supporting them to find ways to have at their pages too.
Being clear on my role in the writing process simplifies everything. Then there’s just the small issue of finding the time and implementing a rhythm, a routine that works. But I remind myself, it’s a grand experiment. I’ve never been this age, in this location, with these people and commitments in my life, writing this story before. Chances are there are some tips and tricks I can employ – learned from other people and from the life I’ve been living up to now – to come up with new ways to get the writing done.
And with this in mind I try things.
Habitual Anchors
What has worked BRILLIANTLY for me since last autumn is setting aside Monday mornings for my creative writing practice. Monday morning, plus my Tuesday evening writing room and boom, the week is off to a great start. It’s unusual for me not to find another opportunity in the week to slide a third session in. But even if I don’t – and here’s the true reason why we need those habitual anchors in our week – I don’t have to stress it because what I know for sure is that Monday morning is going to turn up every seven days. As is Tuesday evening.
Last week on half term however I switched it up a gear. I committed myself to working on my creative writing every day Monday – Friday. I made it accessible (laptop on, open on the story), easy to do (all I had to do was read the story, write more as the nudge came) and plan the best time to do it in (early morning, whilst the children were still sleepy and more interested in CBeebies than me).
Reader, I wrote every day last week. Holidays be damned.
This is a big Yee-Hah moment in my life.
Experiment
Having cracked open the door of writing in pre-planned snatches with my children around I am back thinking about that early morning slot again…An alarm set that would see me at my desk at 6am, with a cuppa and a blinking cursor in front of me. There might also be children but my half-term experiment has shown my fear that they would interrupt me every 2 minutes and I would get nothing done is ill-founded.
What fears are stopping you from finding the time to write? And might they be unfounded? Experiment my writerly friend, experiment…
