Let’s suppose you are a writer, and value your time spent writing, and measure your success in a given writing session in terms of words written. So far so good. This describes about ninety percent of the writers I know.
Let’s take it to another level. Suppose you are behind — or perceive yourself to be so — in recently attained word count. So you take a day off from your paying job to catch up. You get out of bed, heat up the teakettle, walk The Pooch, see your loving spouse out the door to his or her own day job. You pour the first cup of tea or coffee. You sit down at the computer keyboard. You inhale. You crack your knuckles…
You suddenly get a whiff of your own armpits. Good God , you think. I haven’t showered in forty-eight hours. You consider that if this were a real work day, you’d be fresh by now. And productive. Maybe cleanliness provokes productivity?
Best not to take a chance. You get ready to take a shower— But, oh, heck, you might as well press off a shirt so you’ll have something to change into before you return to the keyboard newly clean and scented.
So you go to the closet… Well for chrissake. The hamper o’erflows. How the hell long has it been since you did laundry, anyway? Sure, you can just throw on a ratty old T-shirt today, but tomorrow, tomorrow you’ll need something for work, and do you really want to put off washing your stuff until tonight when you can get so much more of it done while you’re home today? So you sort the laundry, coming up with four roughly equal-sized piles, and you load the first one into the washing machine. Virtuous, you return to the kitchen to freshen your coffee or tea before getting back to the writing.
There’s a banana on the counter. Oh, right. You got that to have with cereal on your day off, didn’t you? Just as well. You need a healthy breakfast. You need to keep your stamina up for the coming marathon of verbosity.
You prepare breakfast. OJ. Hot beverage. Cereal, with sliced banana and 2% milk. No way can you get all that to the desk in one trip, but maybe you don’t need to because after all you’re already in the kitchen, and there’s the kitchen counter with the empty space right next to the morning newspaper. You eat, and you read.
You dismount from the kitchen barstool, heap the dirty dishes in the sink — you don’t have time today to wash the damn dishes!
From the laundry room, sudden silence: final spin cycle complete. You go down the hall, switch the stuff from the washing machine to the dryer, go to the bedroom, get the next load of laundry, put it in the washing machine, turn everything on, and turn to make your way back to the desk.
You pass through the living room en route. The Pooch, who has been sleeping soundly all morning, takes the opportunity to scamper across the floor to you, prostrating herself on the carpet at your feet, stretching out, yaaaaawning, exposing as much flesh as possible for the attention of human fingertips, writhing ecstatically in satisfaction at having now checked off four things from her own daily to-do list: walk, poop, sleep, be adored. She suddenly remembers there was a fifth item… oh, yes, breakfast! Pooch runs to kitchen floor, to the plate which you left there for her a couple hours ago now. She looks down at it, up at you. Down at it, up at you. Down, up. Down…
So you pick up the food from the floor, toss it in the trash, replace it with fresh. The Pooch looks down at it, then up at you. She spins. Looks down, up. Barks. Forget it, you say, and turn your back on her now crushed-by-disillusion self. You return to your home office. Crack your knuckles. Exhale…
About a half-hour and a hundred words later, a sudden loud unmistakable buzzing announces the end of the dryer’s first cycle. You go to check on it. Add ten minutes to the timer…
Somebody really needs to develop and publish a sliding scale for writers. Doing one load of laundry should count for, oh, say, two hundred words. Preparing and eating a healthy breakfast: another two hundred words. Treating a treasured family pet with even fleeting respect: one hundred words. (A mid-day walk, including poopage: another hundred.) And so on.
And then somebody needs to alert agents and editors to the New Way, so they can update their submission rules: No more than eighty thousand words, please, or the equivalent in washing, drying, showering, and walkies.
…Crap. I’m so ready to take a nap now. But the first load of laundry’s done, and it’s all shirts so they’ve all got to come out of the dryer and be put on hangers, and the second load needs to go into the dryer, and the third load into the washing machine. And I should eat lunch…!
And then I’ve got to continue with my writing day…
…well, maybe just a half-hour of shut-eye…
Sherri says
You’re not alone, John. I’d like to know why these things take so much longer when you are doing them instead of writing.
Nance says
Congratulations. You’ve just demonstrated that you really have attained that age that is divisible by both ten and twelve. From here on out, more days will be just like this one until you attain retirement, that time of life when writers who’ve convinced themselves that all they need is uninterrupted time begin to realize that that never was the problem after all, but it’s too late to do anything about it…and then all days will be just like this one. So, we just giggle a lot and share goofy Youtube videos.
Jayne says
Ha! You’ve just described my daily routine! The beauty of working (ahem) from home. And since I’m not writing a book I don’t worry about the word count, only the calorie count, and the count of the daily minutiae accumulating.
I wrote about this conundrum some time ago, convincing myself that having “a room of my own” (yes, like Ms. Woolf herself) would surely lead to increased productivity. But the distractions are too great!
A year I’ve been home now, thinking I’d surely have completed something, anything, one little short story, by June 20, 2011. Yet I haven’t made one submission. Not one. My bad.
You are well on your way, though. So, I don’t think you should consider a day as Master of the pooper scooper and Folderer of laundry as a total loss. I’ll bet you mined some interesting ideas while walking the pooch. ;)
(And how the heck are you supposed to work an upside down recaptcha word?)
Jayne says
Oh, I did it! Amazing–first shot. :)
marta says
The beauty of this is that in the middle of reading this post I remembered the laundry in my washing machine. I stopped reading to go put it in the dryer. Not to mention that under this page of your blog is a page of my short story…
The Querulous Squirrel says
It’s amazing anyone gets any writing done at all. I think Nance is right. The motivation just can’t be sustained indefinitely.
whaddayamean says
“and then you realize that if you just sat down for a couple minutes, this whole thing might make a good blog post. it couldn’t possibly take longer than five minutes or so to put it all down, right…?”
:D
Froog says
Why does procrastinate take such a long time to write?
Kind of like onomatopoeia, but not. There ought to be a word for this quality of some words being able in some way to exemplify their own meaning.
And I have a particularly improbable (thought at least not impossible) ReCaptcha pair here: omstrave naratte.
Not quite a character name? Or could it be – in some obscure language?
John says
Sherri: I’d like to believe the reason why chores take longer when we should be writing is that our minds are occupied with how we’d write about the chores.
I’m kidding myself, aren’t I?
John says
Nance: Way to go. Now I’m even MORE annoyed at my procrastination-or-otherwise. :)
Most times, I tend to be more or less, well, dictatorial about my writing sessions. You know, like: Do NOT bother me with domestic or household concerns for the duration, unless I myself bring themselves up. On Monday, the whole thing went to hell with that whiff, and the subsequent shower, which of course sent me to my closet… It’s like standing on a gravel hillside. Never mind climbing to the top; you can feel your footing slipping away just standing still.
John says
Jayne: You figured out the upside-down reCaptcha? Seriously? Damn — what was the secret, just enter it as though it were right-side-up?
(That and the occasional diacriticals always drive me crazy. Plus — because reCaptcha serves an actual noble purpose, not just minimizing spam — I try to enter EVERYTHING exactly as presented. Punctuat!on mark$, wEIrd-aSs capitalization, the whole lot of it.)
Ahem. Anyway, yes: the tyranny of the everyday. As I was writing this, I was thinking to myself, You lazy S.O.B., you. Some of the people reading this are parents or other caretaker types. Think what THEY have to endure to get 500 words written…!
Somewhere on here — I think a couple years ago — I mentioned an Annie Dillard remark about a feature of the perfect writing space, especially for cutting down on distraction: no windows. I’ve got a window, but I intentionally arranged the space so my back is to it. In my field of vision, the only thing distracting is happening onscreen.
(Which is why I wish I had some sort of software to shut off the Web browser after N minutes of use.)
John says
marta: That comment cracked me up.
I wish I could claim that I wrote this post EXACTLY so that anyone hoping to write something that day would remember their laundry, or their pet, or their child(ren) — and either (a) opt for real life (“The writing will wait while you hug the child, but the child will not wait while you craft the perfect metaphor”), or (b) explicitly choose to write, shutting out all the background noise.
But I wasn’t doing anything remotely like that. I was just whining, haha.
John says
Squirrel: “The motivation just can’t be sustained indefinitely.” Sad words. And I hope untrue, or at least not universally true. Because the gods know without motivation, I’d quite happily spend every remaining minute of my life doing everything but!
John says
whaddayamean: Oh, I see what you did there. Very clever. Chalk that up as #3 on the list of best/worst things about hanging out with other writers — they see inside your head!
marta says
@John – Motivation can’t be sustained indefinitely. What can? But it can be resuscitated.
John says
Froog: Okay, this will probably mark me as even weirder than you (any of you) thought, but — on the subject of those “words which demonstrate their own definitions” — I have a little mnemonic device I use to help me remember which of two alternative words to use in a given situation.
…And of course right now I can’t remember a specific example. But basically, it involves the use of the words “long” and “short.” It takes advantage of the fact that both those words describe length and vowel sounds. So “miles” is a long word, and “mills” is a short one — even though they’re the same length (five letters). Aha, an example: this helps me remember which of several favorite passwords to use with a given site. If the name of the site is dominated by long vowels, I use a longer password; if by short vowels, then obviously I use a shorter one.
On re-reading, that sounds even weirder than I worried it might.
John says
marta: I like the way you think about stuff like that. Thanks.
Some days, I guess a little bit of cold water is all we need. And on other days we need crash carts and a whole team of doctors (or just one Doctor).
murr brewster says
I see no reason not to view writing as a means to accomplish your daily chores. It’s not like they’d get done otherwise.
s.o.m.e. one's brudder says
This could just as easily been a description of my work life back in the apartment-over-the-farmhouse-office days (sans the pooch and spouse, of course). Even us non-writer types can while those minutes into hours, pre-Internet.
John says
murr: Now that is funny. I wonder why nobody’s thought about it before? It goes further: the more critical the writing is — the closer to a deadline, the closer to “The End” — the more daily chores line up to be waited upon. It’s like the gods planned it or something.
John says
brudder: while those minutes into hours
Spoken exactly like one would expect from a commenter at four in the freaking morning!
I had a personal Golden Age of Chorework which lasted, oh, maybe a year or two. Write in the morning, six days a week. Chores in the afternoon. Recreation in the evening. You could set your watch by it, almost. (Well, let’s say a sundial — I wasn’t THAT maniacally anal-retentive.)
But as soon as you let just one other person — a client, a co-worker (let alone a whole group of them), a lover — into the calendar, it all goes up the flue. It’s almost always somebody else’s fault, I’ll tell you that much.