This week’s prompt requires a bit of planning before it can be written.
As some context: a few weeks ago, I was having coffee with a friend who has been keeping an ever-growing note on her phone with snippets of ideas. She’s a journalist so some of these snippets are for future columns, some are for things she’d like to write purely personally, and some are for other potential projects. We were talking about finding time to write amidst all of life’s other obligations (even for someone with a full-time job that involves writing this is tough—or maybe especially in such an instance!).
I told my friend about how I try very hard to accept the fact that I will probably not write anything between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. My semester grades are due, all the people in my immediate family who are not me have birthdays. My kids are young enough that our weekends are packed with Nutcracker rehearsal, choir concerts, guitar recitals, and cheerful over-indulgence in sugar. So, it’s not really a writing season. Often, though, January is a manically productive writing month for me. My classes don’t start back up until the second half of the month and even then I don’t have anything to grade for a few weeks. This year, I woke up at 4am to write an entire draft of a book in the first 20 days of the month. No logical reason I couldn’t have set my alarm clock for 4am in December except that I knew that it wasn't just hours in a day that were scarce but bandwidth.
The thing is though—that this fallow period (well, not really totally fallow since I was running around drinking entire chimexes of dark roast coffee and changing from running clothes into various holiday festive attire in my car most days) was what made the stretch of manic writing possible. I don’t yet know if that writing is any good or what will become of it, but it felt really good to do and it was possible because both ideas and the drive to create had had time to accumulate while I was eating sugar cookies for breakfast and grading composition portfolios.
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