Writing...

is not all work

Photo by Torsten Dederick Unsplash

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November 1987, two months before my daughter's twentieth birthday, I began what has become a lifelong practice of writing every day. At the time, I was writing a play for her, about her, but mostly to entertain her and celebrate her twenty years on earth.

I was working full time for an insurance company, so I wrote first thing in the morning. At the time that meant getting up at 5:30am in order to write, get dressed, and take the bus downtown to the office and be at my desk by 9am. A couple of years later I won my first writer's residency and spent six weeks in a mountain cabin alone, where I wrote a six hundred page memoir. (That's another story!) Shortly after that, my work decided I must be expending my best energy in early morning writing, so they moved my start time to 7:30am.

At first, I was dismayed. The truth was writing daily was what made my life worth living. I went to work happy and energized because I had already kick started my creativity. Not being able to write before work made me unhappy and depressed. I still worked as hard as ever, but without the joy I'd felt before.

So, I decided to get up earlier. I got up at 4am instead of 5:30. I wrote, walked the dog, and either took the bus or drove to work. It was during this time I finished my first novel, wrote more plays, and many short stories. I won the annual writing contest at work three years in a row, even though it was anonymous entry.

Writing daily has been my practice, and one that has worked for me. Thirty-seven years later, I find that sometimes I don't have to produce a number of words daily in order to feel and know I am a writer. I am writing because what I'm working on is what occupies my mind for a part of each day. I am taking time to daydream (outdoors this summer, in my chair hammock), to imagine my characters, their settings, their clothing, their hairdos, their voices.

This week I created an almost eight hour playlist of music from the late 50's and early 60's, because the play I'm writing is set in that time period. I will write songs for this play, and I want to saturate myself with music from the time. As I listen, I imagine my characters listening, even singing along with Etta James, Sarah Washington, Julie London, Nat King Cole, and others.

I don't bother imagining dialogue for specific scenes, because I know I would forget it before I wrote it down. I have faith built on experience that when I do sit down to write words, the words will come. But tunes do not come while I'm sitting at the computer. The tunes come when I'm dreaming, or driving, or in the shower.

Lyrics are like poems, they come when they come. And then they are edited, revised, rearranged to fit the music, or the mood, or the idea.

Writers have different ways to produce their work. Sometimes it is definitely all about "the butt in the chair," and sometimes it is not.

I do still recommend daily writing, even for ten or twenty minutes. It's a foolproof method for keeping a work fresh in your mind. Almost anything is better than waiting for the mood to strike if your intent is to be published (or produced as with plays).

What I'm working on at the moment: a play with music; the third Shirley Combs/Dr. Mary Watson book; and my weekly newsletter (substack).

If you write, what is your preferred method?