Making the Time
W&S is a weekly newsletter about reading, writing, and publishing by author Colin Wright.
Making the Time
For most of us, writing is something we get to do, not have to do.
We maybe have to churn out essays in school, and our lives may be awash in emails, texts, and other forms of casual written conversation. But the flavor of creative writing that requires self-directed time and focus tends to be a choice: you’re not forced to write a novel.
The trick to this sort of writing, of course, is finding the time. A lot of people believe they have a book in them, and that might even be true. But if the time is never right to sit down and let the words flow, that book will never be written.
Between work, family, social commitments, and recovering from all those things, where would said writing even occur, for many of us?
The tough reality of writing is that you don’t really find time for it, you have to make time for it.
You have to carve that time from the 24 hours we’re all allotted each day. And doing so is difficult because those hours are already accounted for. You don’t have spare hours just scattered around the house, hiding in the couch cushions and under the refrigerator, waiting to be claimed and invested in that book you want to write. You’re spending that time on something already, and that means if you want to make the time to write, you have to give up something else as a trade-off.
This kind of prioritization is where a lot of people fall off the “I want to write a book” wagon, because while it’s a really fun and nice idea, the notion of having written a book, giving up time with friends or family, giving up that additional paid work you’re doing, giving up some of the already sparse moments of leisure time you invest in attending a dance class or watching Netflix or playing video games—that kind of sacrifice is a large, sharp-edged pill to swallow.
Unfortunately and fortunately, this barrier to entry is a pretty reliable indicator if you have what it takes to be a writer or not. Are you willing to make that sacrifice, give up that time, trade in whatever else you would be doing so you can write more? And on a regular basis?
If so, your current skill level doesn’t matter too much, because you’ll get where you need to be, eventually.
If not, no matter how naturally deft you are with language and storytelling, it’s unlikely you’ll hone your craft enough to achieve the writing-related outcomes you’re romanticizing.
Worth noting here, too, is that it’s not just time you have to invest in this kind of practice, it’s psychic and physical energy, too.
You don’t just set aside the requisite number of hours and, poof, you have a book. There’s labor involved. There’s an immense amount of imagination, grit-teethed thinking, and sitting or standing at a keyboard (or notebook) for long periods of time. Your eyes strain, back complains, your neck stiffens, and that’s alongside the persistent sense of insufficiency, vulnerability, and self-doubt.
For most people, this kind of investment doesn’t really make sense. The expected payout will be meager, especially in terms of external rewards (internally it can be very satisfying, but most people will never make a cent from their work, and a depressingly small number of readers exist for a given essay, short story, or book).
If none of that dissuades you from pursuing writing further, though, pouring yourself into a writing project is probably the right move. And your main priority, to start, will be identifying things in your life that are less important to you than your writing and swapping them out to make room for long periods of scribbling and scrivening.
Some Writing (& Such) Links
The Accidental Revelations of a Russian Spy’s Memoir
Long piece! But worth a read for what it highlights about how propaganda works, and how sometimes someone involved with said propaganda writes a memoir that let’s the cat out of the bag (oops).
From the piece:
Zorin wrote his memoir in April 2023, after the OPCW’s report on Douma was published in January of that year. He may have opted to simply neglect arguing with the watchdog’s conclusions, or he may have deemed it unnecessary to grapple with the actual Douma attack, given that the readers of his memoir were themselves propagandists who needed no convincing that whatever Moscow says today is correct, even if it’s the opposite of what it said yesterday.
“I Deliver Parcels in Beijing”: Chinese Literary Sensation Reaches U.S.
Adding this book to my TBR pile.
From the piece:
Hu Anyan has held 19 jobs in six cities across China — selling bicycles, running a clothing store, working in a bakery, making 3D architectural renderings, doing night shifts at a logistics warehouse, and eventually delivering packages.
Hu, 46, wrote about these experiences in a memoir-style book, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. An avid reader, Hu documents his encounters with abusive managers, irate customers, and sprawling residential complexes in casual language, and with colorful details and a touch of humor.
When published in 2023, Hu’s book became a bestseller in China. Readers lapped up anecdotes of the lives of some of the millions of couriers powering the country’s ultra-efficient e-commerce industry, which treats individual laborers as dispensable. Many also related to Hu’s experience with economic uncertainty, dwindling social mobility, unemployment, and unfulfilling work.
Baby Shoggoth Is Listening
I really wish this wasn’t the case, but I think there’s actually some sense to this way of thinking. I don’t know that it makes a huge difference if you don’t already have a massive platform (which is thus greenflagged by whatever filters the AI companies use when sucking up otherwise undifferentiated volumes of content from the web), but I get what they’re aiming for here. A bit like writing for the search engine, but for the new masters of search.
(Here’s an explanation of the AI-shaggoth concept, by the way.)
From the piece:
“I write about artificial intelligence a lot, and lately I have begun to think of myself as writing for Al as well,” the influential economist Tyler Cowen announced in a column for Bloomberg at the beginning of the year. He does this, he says, because he wants to boost his influence over the world, because he wants to help teach the AIs about things he cares about, and because, whether he wants to or not, he’s already writing for AI, and so is everybody else. Large-language-model (LLM) chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude are trained, in part, by reading the entire internet, so if you put anything of yourself online, even basic social-media posts that are public, you’re writing for them.
If you don’t recognize this fact and embrace it, your work might get left behind or lost. For 25 years, search engines knit the web together. Anyone who wanted to know something went to Google, asked a question, clicked through some of the pages, weighed the information, and came to an answer. Now, the chatbot genie does that for you, spitting the answer out in a few neat paragraphs, which means that those who want to affect the world needn’t care much about high Google results anymore. What they really want is for the AI to read their work, process it, and weigh it highly in what it says to the millions of humans who ask it questions every minute.
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I resonate with what you wrote here. Making time for my weightlifting sessions realy requires the same intentional carving, I apreciate this insight.