I am the queen of datebooks, calendars, and organizers. You need a list? Call me. I even carry a small reporter’s notebook in my purse. When inspiration strikes, I scribble it down.
I have multiple day planners and various systems to boost my productivity, make me a more efficient writer and a better human being. This is true even when it is not the season of New Year’s resolutions.
So you would think my planners and datebooks would work. Not lately. Instead, they are signs of my procrastination; they help me organize grocery lists, but not get serious writing done.
It’s a sad fact that no matter how often or how well you write down your intentions, sooner or later you have to DO something. For a writer, that means keeping some sort of coherent schedule for writing.
Lately, for me, it’s just not happening.
Most successful writers I have admired followed a writing schedule. Ernest Hemingway? He would write early in the morning. Toni Morrison? She would get up when it was still dark, before dawn, so she could have a cup of tea, watch the sun rise, and only then would begin to write. Isaac Asimov referred to writing as keeping “candy store hours,” because his father had a candy store that was open every day at 6 am and closed at 1 pm. Truman Capote needed to be stretched out on a couch or a bed, with cigarettes and coffee handy, before he wrote.
But for me, schedule? Nope. It is true since I write a weekly Substack column called Casey’s Catch, I’ve been writing every week.
That is, each week when I panic that I haven’t written, I write.
The writing gets done eventually, but not having a schedule is not constructive.
Ironically, I followed a very rigid schedule during the Covid lockdown. From March 13, 2020 and more than a year afterward, I got up at 5:30 nearly every morning and walked to my barn office to write for two hours.
I managed to write a book that way, Saving Ellen: A Memoir, which will be published by Skyhorse Publishing in the next 16 months or so. (More on that later.)
But the isolation of the Covid lockdown also made me feel like I was going crazy, and a schedule helped me cope.
Ultimately, it comes down to the butt-in-chair practice of picking a regular time and place that helps us get the damn work done. Maybe it’s at a neighborhood Starbucks. Maybe it’s the bathtub, like Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter who wrote Roman Holiday.
I really should not need a global pandemic to help me stick to a writing schedule.
But maybe if I buy just one more datebook….
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