Pep Talk

You get your own best time

Hi, Friend.

A few weeks ago I was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, for a literary salon. My friends Ashley C. Ford, Fatima Asghar, and I took turns leading morning craft sessions, and in the evenings we had long, meaningful conversations with one another and with participants—writers from around the world—about creativity and the writing life.

The Q&A’s after those evening talks were always fascinating: a mix of big-picture considerations and practical, logistical concerns. We writers grapple with the same issues, year after year, no matter where we are in our projects or in our careers. How do we know when we’re on the right track? How do we know when we’re making a piece of writing better and not worse? How do we balance an agent, editor, or mentor’s feedback with our own gut instinct? How do we carve out the time?

That last question is what I want to talk about today.

Let me preface this with a confession: I’m not great about managing my time. Period. I can get distracted doing laundry—maybe I get a call and walk upstairs to talk—and then I might start emptying the dishwasher, leave that half done because I suddenly remember an email I need to respond to, then get sidetracked responding to emails (or scrolling), then remember I have to pay some bills while I’m online, then wander back into the kitchen for some coffee, only to find the dishwater open and half unloaded. Maybe, just maybe, I remember that I was in the middle of doing laundry earlier, and I head back to the basement to finish that.

Whew. If that sounds familiar, I’m sorry, and hello, you’re my people.

That said, someone asked during a Q&A in San Miguel about balancing different parts of the work—writing, of course, but also other kinds of work, and caregiving, and admin, and social media (if you choose to use it), etc. Despite being a little scatterbrained in my daily life, I had an answer: You get your own best time.

Let me explain. I know that my brain is freshest and most primed to write—to be imaginative, to generate fresh ideas, to find new solutions to old problems—first thing in the morning, before the day has a chance to get at me. Before my phone starts ringing and the emails start piling up, and I get pulled in multiple directions. That’s just me. Maybe your best, freshest time is late at night, when everyone is in bed and the house is finally quiet. Or midday, when you’ve cleared a few things from your plate and can focus on creative work.

But whenever you are sharpest, give yourself and your creative work that time. Don’t devote the best thinking part of your day to emails and errands.

If you’re best in the morning, like me, try to set aside some morning time to write. Maybe that means getting up before your family (I put a quiet Keurig in my bedroom for a reason). I try to devote mornings to anything generative, and save my afternoons, when I feel a little duller, for errands and admin work like emails. I don’t need peak creativity to go to the UPS store or the pharmacy. I don’t need to bring my best sentence-building potential to my inbox.

When is your brain most primed to make things? Protect that time.

Is that easier said than done? Maybe. You may have a demanding job or caregiving situation, or a long commute, or other aspects of your life that make the idea of writing for hours a day unrealistic. Hear me out, though: You can actually make a lot happen in twenty or thirty minutes. During the salon, I gave participants several writing prompts related to memory, and for each prompt, we wrote together for five or ten minutes. At the end of a three-hour session, everyone left with several starts. Not drafts, but seeds. It’s not nothing!

Many people said in our introductory session that time was a major barrier, standing between them and their creativity; they had work, and families, and writing kept getting moved to the back burner. But if a prompt can get you a start in just a few minutes, then maybe we can think differently about the time we have. It’s there. If I have ten minutes to scroll Instagram, or fifteen minutes in a waiting room, or a half hour on the sidelines of a soccer field during my son’s warm-ups before the game, I have time to start something. I just need to be intentional about it, and be a little greedy with the best hours of my day.

I hope you’ll be a little greedier with your best hours. Your creativity wants them, and your email doesn’t deserve them.

Happy writing, all. I hope it’s a good week for you, wherever you are.

Love,
Maggie