To Be a Writer
Every morning when I awake, I think about the man I want to be on this particular day. What project will I work on? What will I eat? Who will I speak with? What do I hope to accomplish during the next 15 hours? What little crisis or brush fire will break out in some area of my life? How will I handle setbacks, or duplicate successes? Will everything I care about be wiped off the face of the earth by a hurricane or tornado?
It is a lot to ponder. Sometimes I’m certain I am some kind of freak-a-zoid because most other men my age wake up, take a leak, and stumble around in search of clean underwear and coffee. Not me. I want to formulate plans for world peace, energy independence and magically accumulate my own personal wealth before I pour my orange juice and peel a banana. It’s no wonder I go to bed thinking I could have accomplished so much more if I’d only focussed more intensely.
Most days I want to be a writer. Then, I set about creating all kinds of reasons why I can’t write. By setting little booby traps, like going to the post office to ship our books and DVDs to customers, running errands to the grocery store, or fixing the broken screen on the back deck, I can convince myself that those little tasks have just side tracked me a bit from my bigger writing goals, and I can start fresh tomorrow. But every little side track takes me further away from the main line – the track that leads to consistently writing.
The remarkably prolific film maker Woody Allen gets up early every morning and writes for three hours. Then, if he is not actively directing a project, he has the rest of his day to pursue his other interests. From a 1980 interview Allen says, “If you work only three to five hours a day you become very productive. It’s the steadiness of it that counts. Getting to the typewriter every day is what makes productivity.” (And yes, he actually uses a typewriter.) I tried this for a few days. The “getting up early” was a giant fail. During the three days I tried this work schedule, I produced a lot of quality content. Then, lazy, undisciplined slob that I can sometimes be, I slipped back into sleeping late, and rushing about trying to get all my duties and errands taken care of, in lieu of writing.
In the twenty-four hour, always connected, wireless world in which we live, I find it easy to pick up my iPod from the night table, read the news on my Twitter feed, and check my friend’s Facebook pages, before I even crawl out from under the covers. Sometimes, when I hear my wife on her laptop downstairs, I’ll email her a “good morning” from the bedroom. I am certain there are millions of other people who, even though we all know this activity is a mindless time suck, embrace this very same routine. I predict that “Facebook-Twitter time suckage” will soon be listed as a psychiatric diagnosis in a revised DSM IV. (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition.)
