At the beginning of this week I gave a talk to a group of talented, dedicated, thoughtful writers who had invited me to speak to them during a writer’s retreat they had created for themselves. I had been giving a lot of thought to the fact that they chose to DIY their writers’ retreat together, to make what they needed for themselves, rather than relying solely on applying to programs run by others — a wonderful thing too, but not as direct or as dependable as demanding and creating what you need. This is the talk I gave, edited slightly for better readability on the page. I hope you enjoy it.
According to the prolific and delightful novelist and essayist Daniel Pinkwater, interdimensional travel involves three realms: Time, Space, and The Other.1
I am not an expert in interdimensional travel but I have reason to think that when Pinkwater talks about it, he may, perhaps, also be talking about writing.
I have been a writer for a long time and I’ve been talking to people about writing for a long time as a writer, a professor, a book coach, a developmental editor, and simply as a person who has gotten to know an awful lot of writers. I’ve discovered that every time I end up talking about writing, I the amount of time I spend talking and thinking about time and space dwarf the amount of time I spend talking about anything else, including the time I spend talking about words and how to use them and which ones go where and gosh, that’s a nice sentence.
This has led me to believe that the actual writing part where the words happen is The Other. And we’ll get there. This is a writing retreat after all.
First, though, I want to talk to you about time.
For starters: congratulations on this little victory over time you’ve got going on here today. You’ve demanded and created some time for yourselves to do this. Nice work.
I’m congratulating you for a reason. Demanding the time and creating the time is the single most important thing you can do if you want to write, or do anything else that requires your concentrated attention and focus. It can be hard to do.
Note that I do not say “find time.” That phrase is such a sneaky little bastard. When people say “oh, I need to find the time to…” or “you just have to find the time to…” or worst of all, “if you really cared you'd find the time… ." It’s like people believe there’s some secret stockpile of Time somewhere, unspoken-for, totally available, and if you do not somehow magically locate this secret chronological Fort Knox, well, what’s wrong with you?
The actual adult people who tend to have actual unspoken-for chunks of time in their lives, especially in the cultural and economic moment we’re in, are extremely, extremely privileged. They have unspoken-for chunks of time because enough privilege means other people take care of the things you would otherwise need to spend your time doing, like making food and cleaning your house and taking care of your loved ones and, you know, all the other other other stuff that takes up so much time that exists simply because we live in a society that has decided that things like filling out insurance paperwork and getting your drivers’ license renewed are not only absolutely necessary but also far more serious and urgent than anything else a person might choose to do with their precious allotment of hours.
So if you are failing to “find time” I wouldn’t worry about it. You aren’t doing anything wrong. The inability to “find time” is not a sign that you’re failing to do something everyone else magically knows how to do. It’s an exploitative system operating as intended: when people have free time it’s a sign that they’re not on the treadmill.
That’s one of the reasons it’s important to talk about time when I talk about writing, and why it’s important to talk in terms of demanding it and creating it.
We’re not looking for a lost sock, or trying to figure out where we left that Post-it note about the barbecue, here.
We’re talking about doing the work that we know, head and heart, is crucially important for us to do. Sometimes that’s also the work that is important for you professionally, sometimes it’s also your paid work. It can be both — the key is that you know it’s what's important for you to do. You, as a person, with ideas and ambitions and dreams. You as a person who sees and feels things and thinks through things in ways that are in fact not the same as everyone else. Remember that. It’s important.
It’s important, and it's enough of a reason to make some demands on your life and your world and the people and things in it in order to create the time so that the work can happen.
This is something the exploitive culture we live in really does not want us to believe. It’s definitely something the culture we live in would prefer that we not do. This is especially true for those of us who were socialized female. Our culture would rather that we believe that every other need logically and reasonably comes first, all the time, regardless of who needs what.
Now, sometimes there are other needs that DO logically and reasonably come first. As a long-ago mentor of mine used to put it, you gotta put shoes on the baby. But also, our culture would really like us to believe that we have an obligation to actually answer the customer satisfaction surveys that arrive in our inboxes from every online vendor from whom we have ever bought a box of thumbtacks, answer the phone for unidentified numbers that show up on our phones as “Spam Risk,” and spend time worrying about things like what’s trending right now in cushions for your hypothetical porch furniture.
Our real obligation is to do the work of figuring out what our real obligations are. Some obligations are real and obligatory for survival reasons. Other obligations are real because we care enough about the outcomes.
Nothing else is actually an obligation.
Other things, in fact, are a lot more likely to be distractions and drains on your resources that primarily or solely benefit someone who isn’t you, as a matter of fact.
Writing — this work that you’re here to do — is in that category of obligations that are real because we care enough about the outcomes .
This is not only enough of a reason, to do it, it’s the only reason you need and the only reason you need to demand time in which to do so.
It is the only reason you need to demand time in which writing gets to be not just a priority but the priority.
This brings us to space, and by space I mean space in time, but also literal space, actual physical space, and another more important kind of space: space that is free of competing cognitive demands.
Remember: Time, Space, and the Other.
I just talked a little about the time piece, and demanding and creating (not finding) the time to do the work that is important for you to do. But time isn’t enough on its own. There also has to be space if the work is going to get done. There has to be room for the work to come into existence.
Some of this important work we humans do, or might know we need to do, requires physical space. Dancers, sculptors, painters, anyone making physical artworks, anyone playing an instrument or singing — these things need more physical space. Because writing doesn’t need a lot of physical space, and we can actually make it happen sitting on the train with a laptop or anywhere we can whip out a notebook, we often think “oh, I can write anywhere.”
On a purely physical level that’s not quite true, but it’s close.
But space isn’t just physical. It can also be cognitive. Brain space. The space is a metaphor, but you know what I’m talking about: space in which you can think, where you can follow threads and see where they go, space that offers your mind the opportunity to chew on and digest all the things that are part of your important work without also having to simultaneously — and at unpredictable intervals — deal with random or not-so-random arrays of other input.
Virginia Woolf wrote about that “room of one’s own” that one needs in order to write, and specifically she meant that women need rooms of their own. She wasn’t wrong. In Woolf’s era a physical space, where a person could close a door between themselves and everyone else, went a long way toward creating that cognitive space, that space away from competing demands. Men often had the ability to put distance between themselves and competing demands on their attention — doors they could close. Women rarely did.
In the world we live in now, people and things, ideas and sounds, lights and words and information, can and do walk right into our space in a thousand ways, a thousand times an hour, even with a closed door. It has gotten much harder to create cognitive space, those crucial places where there aren’t so many other things flitting willy-nilly into our awareness. The problem isn’t necessarily that we have to do something about each and every one of these things that enter our awareness. It’s that we reflexively notice them. Everything we reflexively notice takes up a little bit of our cognitive capacity. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Cutting down on the cognitive drain of constant intrusions is one reason people still use notebooks. It’s a reason people still use typewriters. It’s a reason people use productivity filters and turn off their Wi-Fi and turn off their phones: it’s how you get access to space with fewer intrusions, fewer things that demand your notice. You do it in the hopes of getting something done.
This is important to think about and talk about, because when it comes to Time and Space there is yet another kind of enoughness that I haven’t talked about yet.
I’ve talked about the fact that knowing there is work that’s important for you to do is enough of a reason for you to demand time. It’s also enough — more than enough — of a reason for you to demand space. But in both cases, there must be sufficient time and sufficient space for the work to take place.
Sufficient as in enough.
This is inconvenient and frustrating and it is crucial.
For the most part, we human beings can’t turn on a cognitive dime. Very few people are able to switch immediately and completely from the scattershot everything everywhere all at once of our daily lives to a state of focus and ability to think clearly and well. We may be, if we demand and create them, be able to step into time and space we’ve made available in order to do our work. But the cognitive shift to intense focus doesn’t magically happen just because we have been able to demand and create the time and space.
There’s a reason for this. Our minds have a sort of inertia. Inertia isn’t just about the fact that object at rest tend to remain at rest, it’s also about the way objects in motion tend to remain in motion. That’s Newtonian, material-world physics, but there’s a cognitive analogue too. The momentum of everything we are involved in, everything we think about and observe and respond to, stays with us. It sticks. We get used to all that input, all of the everything occupying our cognitive space, and all the ferocious constant processing it requires to make sense of it. It can take a while for that momentum to slow down enough that other things — like the important work we want and need to do — can take precedence.
There is not something wrong with you because this is true.
You are not failing to “know how to focus” because this is true. You are not failing to “use your time well” because this is true.
You are not screwing up. You are not screwing anything up. Not at all. Yes, you’ve gone to all this trouble to demand this time, to carve out this space where the rest of the world isn’t going to constantly demand to be perceived — and you are still not screwing up or doing anything wrong if you cannot instantly and immediately get to work and get focused and make the work happen.
Your brain doesn’t work that way. More importantly, your mind doesn’t work that way.
Your mind doesn’t work that way because it evolved to do something very different. Being capable of handling constant multiple inputs has survival value — that’s why we’ve gotten to be so infernally, exasperatingly good at it. We are constantly receiving information, constantly processing it, constantly doing the calculus to figure out what’s important and unimportant, what we must respond to and what we don’t. What’s a threat? What’s not? What is that person, or vehicle, or animal, over there doing and does it affect me? What is that noise? And sometimes more significantly: what is that silence where there should be a noise?
Your mind’s a busy, busy place and mo, you can’t voluntarily shut whole big chunks of it off with a click of the mouse or by putting your phone on silent or even by closing a door. You certainly can’t do it just by wishing that you could. You have to actually get away from the cognitive chaos long enough that your brain has a chance to catch up and slow down.
What constitutes sufficient time and sufficient space to let your mind get uncluttered enough that you can really grab hold of the work is almost always more — sometimes orders of magnitude more — than we ever think it will be.
It helps to practice making the transition, of course. There are ways that a person can learn to let go of constant-input mode a little more easily, sometimes more quickly. You’re doing one of them now, actually: acknowledging and cognitively processing the fact that our minds need time to shift into a different time and space is helpful.
But the key thing to really having it happen is enough time with enough cognitive space.
At which point we can finally get around to talking about The Other.
Would you be surprised to know that this whole theme of “enough” comes up with The Other, too?
The Other is whatever you are doing, whatever you are building, whatever you are creating in the time and space. It is the work itself, in this case writing, which is to say: thinking "out loud,” communicating by putting words into a fixed form.
I want to note, since we’re talking about Space, Time, and The Other, that the difference between speech and writing is space and time. Speech occupies no physical space and does not have duration in time — once the sound is gone it’s over. Writing occupies physical space of one sort or another with actual visible marks on a page or a screen or indeed on a wall or a stone or a cardboard box, and its duration is the duration of the physical object that bears those marks.
So The Other, here, for us today, is this act of communicating by putting words into a fixed form. Writing is the work for which you’ve all demanded and created the time and the space.
I’ve written many books and I’m currently in the process of writing another and here is the most important thing I have ever learned about writing:
WRITE ANYTHING.
WRITE ANYTHING. Externalizing your thoughts gives them a form of their own. When they’re no longer inside you they have an objective existence. You can work with an object in ways you can’t work with something as slippery and evanescent as a thought.
WRITE ANYTHING. Maybe it will surprise you. Surprises may be welcome or unwelcome, but they are rarely boring.
WRITE ANYTHING. If it’s boring, that’s fine. You don’t have to write the boring stuff again. You’ve written it and you’ve gotten it out of the way.
WRITE ANYTHING. The work will not get done unless you do it. If you’ve determined that your work is writing, then WRITING is the only thing that is actually going to get the work done.
WRITE ANYTHING. If there are gaps in your knowledge or references you don’t have to hand, slap in some brackets and leave yourself a note about what to fill in later.
WRITE ANYTHING. There is not secretly an entire panel of Olympic judges watching every single letter you set down to see if it meets some nonexistent set of standards for being the world’s most perfect depthless seamless fathomless perfectly coherent cohesive and stunningly beautiful prose.
WRITE ANYTHING. You are creating something thoughtful and new in the world that wasn’t there before. That is an important job, an essential part of how humans survive and persist across cultures and times.
WRITE ANYTHING. You are doing the work you know is important. Any part of that work is worth writing.
WRITE ANYTHING. Something that is not written will never be enough. Something that is written, though, might very well be. Or it'll be something that’ll help get you there.
WRITE ANYTHING. You can’t revise something that doesn’t exist.
WRITE ANYTHING. I promise you it will be enough to give you a firmer place to stand.
As you all know, I write a Substack called Reasons Not to Quit and this morning’s Reason — which I had scheduled in advance and did not intentionally plan for today — is, I think, intimately connected to all this business with the work you’re here to do today and with Time, Space, and The Other.
This is absolutely, uncontrovertibly true.
And not only is it true, you have also succeeded in demanding and creating the time and the space for that amazing, radiant potential to have the opportunity to do its thing, to do the important, the radical, the profound, the work that only you can do.
So now it’s time for The Other.
Let’s go. Write anything.
Thank you. I needed this.
This is so true, and it goes for anything that involves creating, even if the creation is only policy and not art.