No Wrong Time To Write Right [by Alan Ziegler]

            John Milton felt that early in the morning was the friendliest time for the Muses. He would have a stock of verses ready to dictate by the time his amanuensis arrived, and if his amanuensis was late, Milton would complain that he “wanted to be milked.” 57267614 Charles Darwin was also a morning writer and might announce with satisfaction around noon: “I’ve done a good day’s work.” Anthony Trollope’s practice was “to be at my table every morning at 5:30 a.m.” and “complete my literary work before I dressed for breakfast.”

            Others write while the Miltons, Darwins, and Trollopes sleep. Gustave Flaubert might start at 4 p.m. and work deep into the night. Kafka had a day job (which he probably thought was something-esque) and also wrote surrounded by darkness. On the night he wrote “The Judgment,” he last looked at the clock at 2 a.m.; when the maid arrived—with the bed “undisturbed”—he stretched and declared, “I’ve been writing until now.”

            Some writers claim—contrary to visible and auditory evidence—to be working all the time, like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining, who points out to his wife (rather crudely) that he is working whether or not she hears the typewriter. Others constantly bemoan their lack of productivity yet somehow turn out the work; the writing grows almost imperceptibly, like hairs on the head. One day they’ve finished a story and need a haircut.

            The married writers Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller had contrasting work styles. Hazzard on Steegmuller: “He goes straight to his desk in the morning and stays there. I wander around. I need a lot of silence in my head to find out what I think.” Steegmuller on Hazzard: “I peer in the room and I think she’s free; but it’s reverie . . . I’ve had to learn that Shirley’s writing when she doesn’t look it. She can be tidying up around the house, but she’s working.” (As far as I know, Hazzard never told her husband, “I’m working whether or not you hear the vacuum cleaner.”)

            With some writers, you might not only hear that they are working, you might hear what they are working on. Allen Ginsberg composed “Wichita Vortex Sutra” into a tape recorder on a car trip, and Richard Powers has written out loud, using voice-recognition software. 

            Sustained writing sessions are to be coveted but, just as catnaps can be more efficient than nighttime sleep, so can flurries of writing be refreshingly productive. I often take catwrites during the day: a few minutes here and there with no warm-up. When inspiration invites, you may need to steal time from something else. Ginsberg delayed going to a party for 20 minutes to write “Sunflower Sutra.” He noted: “me at desk scribbling, Kerouac at cottage door waiting for me to finish so we could go off somewhere party.”

            While I was in graduate school, one of my strangest and most felicitous writing sessions came out of sheer shyness. My roommate at the time was visited by a musician whose work I admired. From across the room, my roommate introduced me as his “poet friend.” Too shy to join the conversation, I reached for my notebook and pen and pretended to be writing. The poem I pretended to write came out almost complete in one draft (in less time than it took Ginsberg to write “Sunflower Sutra”). The poem’s central metaphor is self-disappearance; although it is surrealistic, I wrote from experience as the experience was occurring.

            Give yourself a modest minimum goal. It can be quantity: Early in his career, Stendhal assigned himself “Vingt lignes par jour, génie ou pas” (“Twenty lines a day, genius or not”) to guarantee progress as he worked on a book. The novelist Harry Mathews “deliberately mistook his words as a method for overcoming the anxiety of the blank page” for his collection 20 Lines a Day.

            Or, it can be time: Block out thirty minutes a day minimum for writing—any words on any page—four days a week. That’s two hours a week; 104 hours a year. The key is to block out time when you have nothing scheduled afterward. On most days you will do more. On any given day you can do less, but you have to make up that time before the end of the week.

            The poet David Ignatow wrote in his journal: “I am tired and I would like to lie down but deliberately I keep myself seated here to write, no matter what. The idea is to write to make the gesture, to say something worth saying that can send me to bed happy.” With this in mind, many years ago I created the Tonight Show Approach as a way to send myself to bed happy. After Johnny Carson’s monologue, I would mute the sound as Johnny swung his invisible golf club, then write until Johnny thanked his guests. These days, Law and Order reruns work well. I start writing with the discovery of the body, and stop with the verdict. If I am pressed for time, I can end my session with the arraignment.

adapted from The Writing Workshop Note Book

from ther archive; first posted December 18, 2014

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Author: The Best American Poetry