Spacetime of One’s Own

Image from the Spitzer Telescope courtesy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=3883 

As a teenager, I spent much of my free time gaming. But because this happened in the 1980s, when video games were a low-resolution-graphic gleam in designers’ eyes, “gaming” meant tabletop role-playing games, the venerable Dungeons and Dragons and its offspring (anybody remember Tunnels and Trolls?) My favorite magical object with which to equip my characters was the Bag of Holding: on the outside, a simple drawstring bag, but on the inside, a spacetime pocket where the user could stuff any number of weapons, treasures, books, and other necessities. The character didn’t have to bust their back schlepping all these things because the magical storage unit held them, ready for retrieval.

I’d love to create a writer’s equivalent of a bag of holding, not to stow my laptop, but to use as a study only I can access–a room of one’s own, as Virginia Woolf put it in her eponymous 1928 essay, free from distractions or responsibilities other than to the page and the story. I’d also equip my spacetime pocket with a beneficial temporal feature: no matter how much time I’d spend writing in there, I’d emerge at the same time during which I’d entered, with no time elapsed in ordinary space.

Articles and books aimed at aspiring writers encourage, and sometimes chide, readers to make time to write every day. Sometimes they take a scolding “if I can do it, so can you” tone. These advice-givers remind us that they didn’t start out as full-time writers, that they held down full-time jobs, and if they could scratch out a pocket in spacetime to write, what’s our excuse?

I’ve noticed a pattern: these admonishing writers usually describe juggling work and writing, not writing and raising a family and/or caring for elders or family members with disabilities. Having done all of these things, usually simultaneously, my impression is that the work-writing balance is more straightforward than the family-writing balance because most of us work at set hours and don’t take our work home. (Exceptions abound, of course: teachers take papers home to grade; some folks’ homes are their workplace.) Thus, one can schedule writing time as one schedules work. It involves sacrifices for sure–I get up at 3 a.m. so I can exercise and write before work, and to get adequate sleep, I retire at the same time as my six-year-old does–but in settings where everything else finds its place on an appointment calendar, one can make it happen.

The work of caring, on the other hand, doesn’t fit so readily into a schedule. Focused as it is on tasks rather than time, caregiving overlaps temporal boundaries. You know this if you’ve ever scrambled to get to work on time because your preschooler insists on buttoning her own sweater, takes ten minutes when you’d take 30 seconds to complete the task for her, and then becomes overwhelmed with frustration when she finds the tiny holes too difficult to manage and needs another ten minutes for hugs and soothing.  When spinning in the vortex of a time crunch, writing time–like any species of “me time”–is the first thing to go.

Small helping hands, courtesy of Self-Sufficient Kids: https://selfsufficientkids.com/kids-chores-how-get-started/

No wonder that, historically, writers belonged to the aristocracy! Somebody else did the laundry; somebody else tended to the children; a whole staff of somebodies made writing lives possible for many a famous literary figure. The English Romantic poet William Wordsworth, for example, acknowledged his wife, his sister, and his sister-in-law–all of whom performed the quotidian deeds that kept him fed and housed in comfort–as “dear hands” who brought food and other necessities. (Not even people–disembodied helping hands!) The wealthy writer didn’t need a bag of holding–they had a room, a suite, a wing of their own and a door to close on familial cacophanies.

Almost a hundred years later, Virginia Woolf’s observation still holds true: to get serious about writing, we require our own funds and our own space. (Although she was talking about women writers, I think her words can apply to people of any gender for whom time-consuming, and unpaid, caregiving takes up a significant portion of their day, and sometimes night as well.) Independence, professionalism, being taken seriously (until one gets not just published but remunerated reasonably for one’s writing, often friends and family treat your “scribbling” as a hobby that can be interrupted)–all of these are boons to writers. And the largest boon of all would be distributing the work of caring for children or elders so most of the responsibility doesn’t devolve onto one person. When one person gets designated “the carer” (especially if that person also works for pay and then comes home to the second shift in the home), writing inevitably gets shelved.

Oxford World Classics’ cover for Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

Solutions to this spacetime crunch abound, and they’re different for everyone. For some, liberation comes from outsourcing these activities to others: a paid house-cleaner, a grandparent who can take care of the kids for the day on weekends, subscribing to those online meal services where ingredients get delivered to you and you just have to heat them up. For others, it’s worth the sweat and tears to sit down with one’s significant other and hash out a plan for making the home-work load measure up to the 50/50 ideal.

A wise friend who’s also a minister reminded me that an alternative is not to try doing all these things at the same time, but rather to think of life in terms of seasons. For those who don’t have the option of putting aside the heavy caregiving duties–a single parent, for example–perhaps the difficult but necessary solution is to postpone one’s writing “season” until one’s children are old enough to do their thing more independently. The trick is to prevent “mission creep” from making hiatus from writing permanent. Bigger kids require less intense, constant, hands-on parenting, but their web of activities and relationships often requires parental assistance. This can defer one’s writing season until retirement. (This may be a viable option for some, especially as our overall increase in health and longevity means that many folks can enjoy at least two decades of vibrant life after retiring.) But to keep the writing flame alive before the kids grow up and move away, maybe you can shift your focus: away from novels or book-length narrative nonfiction, with the greater time investment and sustained attention they require, to shorter forms that one can squeeze into one’s briefer free moments, such as poetry or essays.

My writing seasons fluctuate through the year, with months of diligent, productive daily writing followed by fallow periods. These doldrums happen for a variety of reasons: I’ve completed one project and want to let it rest before revising (I’ve never mastered the ability to start the next project at this time), a heavier workload in my medical practice, or a time when a family member needs more support. These “off” times don’t last long, but my spouse always notices that when other constraints push my writing into the exosphere where I can’t reach it, I’m more somber and sad. When I get back on course, he notes that my “spark” is back too. (There’s some incentive for skeptical family and friends, the kind who dismiss your true heart-work of writing as a hobby or a lark: they’ll have a more joyful loved one if they get on board with your need to write on a regular basis. More writing, better mood, and a more present parent/partner/friend. If they need a stick with that carrot, you can always remind them that they might show up in your published work someday, despite that disclaimer that the characters aren’t based on anyone living, dead, or spotted through a high-powered telescope on Venus.)

A long dry period in my writing has come to an end (whew!) and I’m rejoicing in the way that, perhaps paradoxically, rekindling my writing flame has given me the grace of being more present in the rest of my life. Watch out, page, my spark is alight once more.