My critique group had its second meeting this past weekend, and, in addition to some great discussion of our work, we also bemoaned the great time conundrum. With jobs and families and life stuff–both ordinary and extraordinary, how on earth does a person find time to write?
I wrote my first novel in fits and starts, a few pages at a time, over five years, and it feels disjointed and jagged. My fractured time led to a fractured novel. I wrote my second novel while on sabbatical over a glorious period of about six weeks during which time nothing else demanded my attention between 9 am and 5 pm. It was luxurious and rare. This novel coheres.
I won’t have such time again anytime soon, and most people never have it. So, how does one write a cohesive novel without cohesive time?
People have different strategies to keep themselves writing. Some are length based: two sentences per day or one page per day. Some are time based: fifteen minutes per day or before the kids get up. Others are incentive systems: chocolate comes at the end of a writing session. Others are community based: I tell you how much I will accomplish, and you tell me you much you will accomplish, and we hold each other accountable. These are all good systems, but none of them address the cohesion issue.
I can find a few minutes per day to write, but in that fragmented work model, I lose my rhythm, and then my book feels out of sync with itself. I need to find a way to maintain my groove when I’m not writing.
So here is a new strategy I am launching today: I will continue to grab at time to write, but when I’m not writing, I will carry my main character around with me. I will think about the challenges he faces in my fictional world, and I will also imagine how he would respond to the real world situations I move through. For example, when I walk into my classroom, I will ask myself, “Where would Micah sit? What would he think of today’s reading?” When I go to the grocery store, I will think about what Micah would want to buy. My hope is that taking Micah with me in my real life will make it easier to get in touch with him when I sit down to write–I will never have been out of touch–and I may even discover scenarios that I want to work into my novel.
I will report back next week. For my first exercise, I ask myself what Micah thinks of this blog post. Turns out that he doesn’t get blogs at all. Doesn’t see the point. And so my character develops.