Time + Place
On Being a Writer Chapter 2: Arrange
I’m reading through On Being a Writer by Ann Kroeker and Charity Singleton Craig this summer. One week in and I’m already behind! Proof that summer really has its own rhythms and timetables. Ironic that this chapter is called “Arrange.” It’s about making real space in your life for writing.
So the first step is calling yourself a writer. The next step is creating a writing life, arranging your time, energy, and physical space to support your writing. Sarah Cook talked about this at the new moon. She began by saying that a single day is too short to see measurable progress as a writer. On too many days the list of what got done creatively looks meager. But at the end of a month, there are riches.
This reckoning immediately resonated with me as a homeschooler. Many, many things can go wrong in a homeschool day. I never know when a math lesson might derail us or someone wake up on the wrong side of the bed. But over the course of a week, we can usually get most of our work done. Thinking about the course of a week or a month or even a season changes our expectations of what can be accomplished.
After widening our time horizons, Sarah talks about using what’s true about us as people to help us arrange our writing time. She calls this sun writers and moon writers. Sun writers are a bit more structured, while moon writers flow with the tides. As much as I love the moon, I am certainly a sun writer, Short, but regular writing sessions are the way I can reliably move work forward.
But it’s not just our schedules that need arranging, it’s also our physical spaces. A few years ago I moved from a loveseat in the guest bedroom to a desk on the sun porch. It’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer, but it’s just right for writing. From my desk I can see the hills on the far side of the river. The hills where I attended a lovely contemplative retreat. The hills where Ursula K. Le Guin lived. Last week it was announced that her house is being turned into a writers residency. And you can bet that I’ll be applying!
I’d love to hear how you’ve arranged your writing space or what your writing schedule looks like and if you’re a sun or a moon writer.
Are there small changes to your schedule or physical space that might support your creative work?
I love both your desk and Ursula's. Such cozy places to write. I haven't had a dedicated desk in years. Our house is tiny and my husband gets the office since he earns the money. My teenaged daughters have desks where they can do their schoolwork. Everyone else, including me, has to make do with other spaces. Instead of a desk, my homeschool and creative space both tend to center on me sitting on my bed. I've got a messy table next to me, my beautiful bedspread made of recycled saris, my happy curtains, my beach rocks and shells lined up on the windowsill. Piles of books on the table, shelf, floor. It's a chaotic jumble and perhaps not always conducive to focus. But it's what I've got. But you know even when I was in college and *had* a desk half the time I was working on my bed anyway.
I love the sun vs moon as images for different types of creative lives. I'm most definitely a moon-type. I have bursts of creativity that last weeks or months and then fallow seasons where writing seems to disappear. Then something happens and it blooms again. I've learned to go with the flow and not to despair when I'm in a fallow time. The fields might look empty, but I assume things are happening deep in the soil and the growth aboveground will happen at the right time.
It reminds me, now that I think of it, of Melissa Wiley's Tidal Homeschooling. We've never quite been tidal homeschoolers in the same mold as her family, but early on in our journey It gave me comfort to recognize that a day wasn't necessarily the best measure of our accomplishment. Especially in a household of neurodivergent learners, things tend to happen in their own times and seasons.
Recently I've been in a writing slump. I'd hoped for time and focus and instead everything seems calculated against it. The words aren't coming and other things are taking my focus. The last thing I wrote was a description of the cardinal's nest in our rosebush in a letter I plan to send to my sister at some point. Doctor and therapy visits crowd our days and even our vacation time at the lake seemed to fill itself up and there was precious little time for reading, drawing, and writing. Or maybe the problem isn't the time at all but my own brain. Maybe it's just the wrong season.
I never know what will catapult me into a productive season. They just seem to happen. Nothing quite as regular and predictable as the moon's lovely 28 day cycle. It's more like the seasons of the year which come and go in their own time, sometimes early, sometimes late.
I am very much a sun writer even though I too love the moon- it's even my last name!
My arranging this year has taken the time of creating temporal space for writing. Every evening, I put my smaller kids to bed and set my daughter up for her 15 minutes of extra-special big-kid post-bedtime independent reading. Then I make a pot of tea, stand at the kitchen counter, and write while the tea steeps. Sometimes my daughter is done after 15 minutes, sometimes it stretches into 30 minutes, or 40, and I just let her go on, because I'm writing. After years of frustration with trying to fit writing into the cracks of my day, I've written more in these tiny, consistent time increments than ever before. It's exhilarating. The writing leads to more writing, and I no longer feel nagging guilt during the day when I feel like I should be writing, because the writing now has a home in my day.
At the new year, inspired by a post of yours, I printed out a simple three-month calendar. Every night I manage my writing ritual, I give myself a star on the calendar. No pressure to maintain a streak, just a simple acknowledgement of a good habit kept. It's magical.