Who has the time?
/On Tuesday mornings I go to Backstreet Community Arts to work with anyone who wants to write, offering guidance for their memoirs, fantasy novels, poetry, or just plain personal journaling. It’s a good thing.
One strategy I use for those who arrive with no clear idea of what they want to write is to give them a WASTE BOOK from my huge personal stash of Field Notes Quarterly Limited Subscription notebooks, then pull a card randomly from the Empowering Questions deck that I keep on our table for this very purpose, and then ask them to spend ten minutes scribbling in their new WASTE BOOK answering the question. They don’t need to worry about spelling, or complete sentences, or even sharing what they’ve written. It’s just a way to get them to commit things in their heads onto paper, to break that interior monolog that tells them they’re not really a writer.
Yesterday, after I passed out Austin Kleon’s quickie zine, “Ten things I love about [self]” and we made ourselves say good things about ourselves; and after Danny shared another fabulous poem and I looked over the start of his short story —everyone else was working and I was twiddling my thumbs, so I decided to pull a card and write.
::sigh::
WHAT WOULD I DO IF I HAD ENOUGH TIME?
What do I do when I have time?
First of all, how very dare you? Calling me out like this?
The fact that I am fully retired? What’s that to the purpose? Sure, all I have is time, and almost of it is free time. But that doesn’t mean I have time time, does it?
No, it doesn’t. And I resent the implication that just because I have time that I am wasting it, wasting time, if I’m not actually doing all the things I could be doing if I had time. Which I do not have.
For example, I could be grinding my way through all those video tutorials in order to learn a new music layout program so I can work on new music projects. Like what, you ask? Like Ten Little Waltzes — of which, I will remind you, I have written four, I think. And there’s the unfinished opera Seven Dreams of Falling, the first Dream of which is awesome. Only six more Dreams to go.
Mostly I could be working on that new orchestral suite that I’ve been yammering about for a decade. Hey, I have the main theme, the leitmotif, hammered out — I just need forty more minutes of actual music to go with it.
Then there are the books I’ve been thinking about writing: the cocktails book, the Beethoven Blueprint book, the children’s book. How the heck am I supposed to squeeze those in with all that music that I’ve been thinking about composing at some point? Not to mention my memoir, A Perfect Life — that’s a real time-buster.
Plus I really should practice my cello sometime, right?
These things take time.
Why The Onion doesn’t hire me, I’ll never know.
