Twilight. My old preferred writing time. Many of my teenage poems got written at twilight (before the word was taken over by all things vampiric). There is something about it that lends itself to musing, wistfulness, and other stuff that precedes writing.
When to write now? Weekdays, I get a little window of time in the morning, after the house empties except for me, and all the posts so far have been written then.
As I’ve been learning to justgetonandwrite, whether I’m ready or not, being prepared to get underway in the morning has been good. A little pondering, a little flexing of the writing muscles doing this blog, a little reading of someone else’s writing to set the tone for further writing (for work).
Come Saturday, and the house belongs to all of us again. Which makes it harder to find a corner to write in – and easier to get distracted into all the weekend catch-up stuff.
Back in a distant, full-time office based life, we had time management training at one point. The trainer got us to think about when were our most productive times of day, the ones where we felt really awake, and to use those for our work that needed the most concentration. Good notion, and one that I used quite a bit. Mine was, not so surprisingly, after my mid-morning coffee.
Now that I’m writing part-time – and juggling various different activities – I am, also quite helpfully, having to write when it’s ‘writing time’, rather than preparing for it. I am discovering that I can do more then than I expect. I also now have the converse – having to stop, even when the words are clacking away, because I have to move on to the next thing.
But if I want to do more writing for me – which I guess these blog posts are partly exploring – is that to be at my ‘best’ time? My ‘squeeze it in’ moments? I don’t yet know. It would be good to make it a regular time. Part of me would like to be like one of those Proper Writers, the disciplined ones, who arrive at their typewriter at X o’clock, type their required number of words, and repeat daily.
The light has almost gone behind the tall ash trees across the way. They are in full silhouette now. Is the writing to be like the light, coming and going, or like the trees, a fixed part of the view? Whichever way round, both are part of the reason to look up – and admire a different view.