The hardest thing about being a writer is making good use of your time.Time is a writer’s most precious commodity, after imagination—and maybe even before.For it is in the conservation and consolidation creating an abundance of time, that our imaginations percolate.
I would imagine this is the way it is for all artists. Yet for writers there is the added practicality of not only getting the words out and on paper, but the time it takes to write/type them, and then order, arrange and rearrange them. Following that there is the required dormancy or period of simmering–like with cooking soup having been brought to a boil, and the making of which cannot be rushed.
Poet, Marie Ponsot, a wife and mother now in her eighties, suggests 7 minutes is all a writer needs to place their stamp upon the day. Seven minutes. A wife and mother myself, Ponsot’s words are music to my ears.
Time.
Seven minutes.
Consistency.
Why is it that I’m always looking for the big clumps of time to donate to my writing?
It makes me feel better to say I have worked 3, 4 or 5 hours this day on a certain piece of writing. That comes from having read article of writers discussing and disseminating their processes of crafting a story wherein they talk of having written up to 18 hours a day at some points. Perhaps they did.
But that’s not me—at least not now.
Then there is the question of whether the amount of time one puts into their writing in each sitting is directly equivalent to the quality of the writing created?
Perhaps.
A more overriding concern is—how best to apply one’s time to one’s writing if the goal is to achieve fresh, vibrant and imaginative prose and dialogue that keeps the reader engaged unto the last syllable? What is the worth?
Quality.
I’ve always revered old people, particularly the ones who delved into an art form during their youth or early midlife and brought it to fruition through the decades they have lived–six, seven, eight, even nine for some—and while attending the routine affairs of life like raising children, holding down a nine-to-five job, caring for elderly parents—living life.
There’s something about the time they’ve given, the years, hours and days, they’ve hung in there—committing themselves to not only the development of their artistic skills, but their presence in the flow of life—from which all writing comes.
Life like, writing is not easy. It flows one day after the next, like the words of a sentence that go on to form paragraphs, chapters and eventually a short story and/or a book.
I here wisdom in Ponsot’s choice of seven minutes–not ten or five—seven.
Seven in Tarot is the sign of change.
There are also seven days in the week—the time in which God is said to have created the Earth.
This day.
Seven minutes.
Perhaps, one day, a book.