How does a woman learn to commit to safekeeping time and space to get her writing work done? Finding answers to that question is not easy. The kind of things a woman should change, commit to, and double down on to make her writerly life a success are hard to pinpoint. The theme of virtually every article I have read about how to write is straightforward: Just do it. Just find the time to write. Just write! You need a self-management goal plan, and you need to do it!
So why don’t we? How can so many women be so morally bankrupt that they can’t take this simple advice?
Here’s what I think: we try to pretend that the advice we are given is really good and the failure lies with all the women writers who can’t make it work for them. The failure lies at our feet.
It doesn’t make any sense. Is it not more logically that the advice we are given is just really bad advice?
Toni Morrison admits that she has no routine. She says, “I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.”
Likewise, Margaret Atwood, despite her enormous output, does not write every day. She said: “You always think, ‘Oh, if only I had a little chalet in the mountains! How great that would be and I’d do all this writing . . . Except, no, I wouldn’t. I’d do the same amount of writing I do now and the rest of the time I’d go stir crazy. If you’re waiting for the perfect moment you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.”
These woman give me hope.
I know that I often feel totally overextended, as I suppose most women who want to create do, and like bell hooks, I think “often and deeply about women and work, about what it means to have the luxury of time – time spent collecting one’s thoughts, time to work undisturbed” (p. 125).
Writing requires time, and it is difficult to try and sneak in shreds of a creative life. We can pretend it is not so, but sneaking a life because the real one is not given room enough to thrive is hard on a woman’s vitality. I know, deep inside, that it is not a scheduling issue. And I suspected for many it is not a resistance issue, even though Rosanne Bane (2012) said, “Every writer experiences some kind of resistance from time to time” (p. 5). Writing is about art and craft, but it is also about discipline. Women who know their current methods are not working need simple practices that bring them to their writing space regularly. It is too easy to be subsumed, and for people to assume that this is natural and how it should be. It is a matter of staking our ground to get and maintain a sustainable and satisfying writing habit.
We can do it. There is hope, especially if we are willing to listen to women writers who have done it, who have made it work, like Morrison and Atwood and hooks. Let’s not listen to the people who demand that we just do it! They don’t get it.
