Taking the Time to Write

Yesterday my mom asked me about Joyce Carol Oates' writing style.  While I happen to be quite inexperienced with her writing, I was explaining to my mom what I know about her writing habits and the habits and writing styles of other prolific writers.  This got me thinking about the amount of dedication and time that writing, whether as a career or hobby, requires. 

In The Midnight Disease, Alice Flaherty describes writers who suffer from hypergraphia, an uncontrollable compulsion to write usually caused by high temporal lobe activity such as temporal lobe epilepsy and bipolar disorder.  People with hypergraphia write constantly and extensively.  For example, Lewis Carroll, who is believed to have had temporal lobe epilepsy, wrote 98,721 letters from his late twenties to his death at sixty-five.  Flaherty also talks about "normal" but prolific writers, such as Joyce Carol Oates, who do not have abnormal temporal lobe activity, but who write almost as extensively as writers who do.

It's not easy to put that amount of time into writing.  For me, the difficulty is putting aside all the other things that need to be done, or could be done.  There are always dishes to do, mail to sort, stuff to look at online or out the window.  A long day working at the job that actually pays is always a good excuse.  In Bird By Bird, Anne Lamott describes writing constantly, every day, even when she was working full time.  This is what is really hard, the commitment to just do it, just keep going.  Lamott follows the advice of her father, who was also a writer:

"Do it every day for a while," my father kept saying.  "Do it as you would do scales on the piano.  Do it by prearrangement with yourself.  Do it as a debt of honor.  And a commitment to finishing things."

I have friends who write, too and I think we all have the same trouble with it.  One has been writing for years, has even been published.  She tells me, "I'm going to start writing again," and weeks later she's still telling me the same thing.  Another says to me, "let's go somewhere and just sit and write" so we go to the park and we sit and we talk and we people watch with our notebooks and pencils in the grass beside us.  I think that there is value in the desire to write and in the intention to write, but at some point you actually do need to just sit down and write.

See also:  The Inner Manic