by Bruce BethkeWhat is the one absolutely essential thing a writer needs? Is it raw talent? Good craft skills? A unique vision? An overabundance of pure imagination? Gobs and gobs of plain old chutzpah? The Stephen King Signature Edition of Novelizer 7.1, with the optional BestSellerator plug-in pack?
None of the above. It's time.
Stripped to its barest essentials, that's what we writers do: we turn time and thought into words in a medium, which, it is devoutly to be wished, some other person will find worth their time to read. So, more than anything else, what a writer needs is time, to be alone with his or her thoughts.
The whole problem with time, of course, is that there's never enough of it. Perhaps that's why we write so many stories involving time: time travel, slow time, fast time, moving faster than time, parallel time/space, going back in time to have a do-over...
That's fiction. Out here, where we do the work, time is made and consumed at a steady rate of 1X, and the only way we can "make" time to write is by stealing it from something else. So maybe our lawn doesn't look as good as our neighbor's lawn, or the living room doesn't get vacuumed as often as it should, or some days we just say the heck with it and schlumpf around in sweatpants and a t-shirt all day. More commonly we try to skimp on sleep, either by writing too late at night or too early in the morning, or else we carry a notebook or laptop with us everywhere, and try to steal little bits and ends of time during the day.
That's a great way to produce writing that looks like little unconnected bits and fragments, strung together. If your intention is produce words that emulate a collage, keep going that way. But never write in a coffee shop—unless your intention is to produce a novel about four chatty female friends who do nothing but meet in a coffee shop daily, to talk about their sex lives. And that would probably be a bestseller in today's market, if you made them a vampire, a witch, a were-cougar, and a mermaid. Call it, oh, Hex and The City. No, wait, that one's probably taken already.
So where do you find the time to write, without living an unhealthy life or shortchanging your family? Here are three easy-to-implement suggestions.
1. Turn off the television. The Great Eye of Sarnoff is only feeding you the illusion of knowledge. You'll be astonished at just how much more clearly and creatively you will be able to think if you just stop watching the damned thing.
2. Stay off Facebook. Facebook is the mind-killer. It is the biggest time-sink ever created. If you want to squander hours at a time and accomplish nothing, just keep going on Facebook.
3. —and this is the hardest one for me to admit—Minimize your blog-reading. Blogs are at least a titch more intellectually stimulating than Facebook or television, but reading and commenting on blogs, too, can readily grow into a full-time occupation. It's like being at a cocktail party that never ends. Remember, even Oscar Wilde wasn't "on" and a brilliant conversationalist all the time. He needed time alone with his thoughts, and his words, and his paper and pen, to write.
So in a rare example of practicing what I preach, I am shutting off the Comments on this thread. Today, get off the Internet. Go thou and write.
Here endeth the lesson.
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