Ordinary Time

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.  Anthony Trollope, Autobiography.

 

Anthony Trollope – one of my favorite Victorian novelists, both in terms of the quality of his work and the character of his life - knew what he was talking about. He paid a servant £5 a year extra to wake him up at 5:00 a.m. with a cup of coffee. He was a novelist from 5:30 to 8:30, then he stopped writing – in mid sentence, if necessary – and went to his job as a functionary in the post office, where he found time to invent what the British call the “pillar box,” allowing mail to be picked up en route more efficiently. 

If he finished a novel at 8:15, he started in on the first 250 words of the next one. By working in this way he produced 47 novels in the course of his lifetime, including some of the best portraits of clergy life, and the effect of that life on families, that have ever been written. I could do much worse than to follow the advice of Anthony Trollope.

 

Yet I find myself wondering what on earth Anthony Trollope would make of the class I am taking right now – not a class on writing itself, but a class on The Writing Habit. Why would someone who can push a button on her Mr. Coffee in the morning and save £5 on a servant need to take an 8 week, $240 course in order to find time to write?

 

I’m not quite sure, but there are sixteen of us. We meet from 5 to 7 p.m. on Tuesdays in a classroom at Open Book, the arts organization in which the Loft Literary Center is housed. Our instructor is a popular “creativity coach,” a warm, friendly, humorous woman who has made a business of figuring out how to motivate people to do this work. The first half hour to 45 minutes is “check in time,” where we each report on the goals we had set for ourselves the week before in terms of establishing that habit – goals we witness and sign in pairs to hold each other accountable. The goals are divided into three areas - “process” time, in which we are supposed to focus on creative activities that “prime the pump” but do not necessary result in product; “self-care,” in which we make sure to replenish the resources that make creativity possible, and “product time” in which we work on a particular project that we are trying to move forward.  

 

And in the time we spend gazing at our respective New Age navels, Trollope would have written 2000 words. 

 

Let me say right off that I like my instructor, even if she may be the Unholy Love Child of Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) and Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way). “Who wants to go first next?” she asks. We are doggedly unhierarchical, and fight over the ironic delight of being the last person to go first. 

Someone admits that they forgot what their process goal was this week, and did something else instead. “Was it in the spirit of your process goal?” we ask. If so, that’s OK. We debate for awhile over whether taking a walk is process time or self-care. The technical answer? It depends. 

People can spend an inordinate amount of their check-in on their self-care regime. We learn who has meditated six times a week, who is getting eight hours of sleep a night, who is buffing up at the gym.  I think of the desperate middle-aged job seekers in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream – the book I had the misfortune to be reading when I was forced out of my own job. The longer these people remained unemployed - the more looking for a job became the job - the more escape seemed to be found on the treadmill. If you’re not going to be going anywhere anytime soon, I guess, at least you can burn up some calories. 

Occasionally one of us admits that we completely forgot to put in any product time. We scrutinize that person’s activities carefully, because inevitably there is something hiding in the week that “counts” as product. We must go easy on ourselves, to avoid building up creative resistance, or giving in to the Saboteur. 

 

OK, my Saboteur is a little cynical. Sometimes I need to tell her to just shut up and listen.  

 

We do a guided imagery meditation to free up our imaginations. I have done many of these, and I know the drill. You’re walking along a beach. You feel the sun on your back, the breeze in your hair… 

Yada, yada, yada. I walk along the frickin’ beach. 

You come to a spot that is marked with an “X”- just like it would be if you were walking on a treasure map - and you start digging. 

Oh please. 

Eventually you pull up a beautiful box, and when you brush it off and open it up it is brimful of treasures. These treasures are all the thoughts and feelings and experiences you have to write about. Now open your eyes and write down everything you saw in the box. 

 

There is only one thing at the bottom of my velvet-lined box. A band of gold. My wedding ring.  

 

I cry through the whole hokey exercise. 

 

Anthony Trollope sits in the chair next to me, embarrassed and confused. Women are never prepared for these things. The imaginary hanky he pulls from his breast pocket is of no use to me, and the Saboteur has to run to the rest room for toilet paper. 

Tears splash down on the hand I hold discreetly to my sniffling nose.  I keep on writing.