What I'm Doing When I'm Not Writing

“It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.” —Robert Hass

Recently, dissatisfied with my income from editing and proofreading out of my home, I took a part-time job teaching three to five mornings a week. Including the commute, it takes only four hours and 20 minutes of my time each day I work. The plan was that I would leave the house after the boys went to school, return home two hours before they got back, and during those two hours I would write. By juggling my schedule creatively, I would increase my income with minimal loss of precious writing time, though I would be noticeably busier at other times of the day. And night.

The plan hasn’t worked out that well. Instead I find myself squandering my two writing hours, unable to disengage from the outside world and enter the space in my head where I write. I’m sure it can be done, that there is some trick or trigger that could get me there. I’m sure it’s a matter of discipline, which I thought I had, but now am no longer convinced of.

I once read about a writer who uses the sound of a gong that begins Zen practice to begin her writing practice. In a Pavlovian way, she has trained herself that the sound of the gong means it is time to clear her mind and start writing. She even uses a virtual gong tone she found online so she can enter writing consciousness at her desk in front of her PC.(I was going to put the link here but I can’t seem to locate it now.) Anyway, it turns out this method doesn’t work for me.

So what is it that I’m doing instead of writing? I check my email, my blog hits, my website hits. Then I do the ironing I was saving to do at the same time that I supervise homework, since I can answer math questions and listen to oral reading assignments and still iron at the same time, but I cannot write at the same time. Then I check my email again, because someone might have sent me fabulous news in the last 45 minutes, maybe the link to a gong tone, right? Next I work on editing a paper for a client, even though I was planning to do that later in the evening after the boys have gone to bed, since I can edit when not completely fresh but can’t seem to write then. And then the boys are home and the chance to write is gone.

This week the wise poet Mari L’Esperance posted the following on her Facebook update: The avoidance of writing is akin to an avoidance of death. To write is to actively acknowledge the possibility and limitation of language and, correspondingly, of oneself in this lifetime...

Oh, so that’s what I’m doing when I’m not writing. I knew it wasn’t really about folding the laundry or writing lesson plans.

Later Mari L’Esperance added this in the comments section of her Facebook update: One could also say that writing all the time is also a kind of avoidance of death...

The combination of L’Esperance’s seemingly contradictory observations are what I think Robert Hass meant by “The only tolerable state is having just written.”

Now it is Sunday morning. My husband took the boys out for the morning and will bring them home after lunch. He is giving me time to write. I put on my book-shaped earrings (this is the first time I have attempted a physical talisman) and will settle in to write seriously some poetry. As soon as I finish updating my blog, as though the insightful and concise words of Robert Hass and Mari L’Esperance could ever be improved upon by my recursive ruminations……

Well, hello there, Death.