Time in the Chair

My friend Cheryl tells me that writing is about your butt in the seat or time in the chair. She's right. It's a discipline and I'm trying desperately to master it. Some days are better than others.

Tonight, it's a struggle.

I woke this morning thinking, "Is it Friday?" and then realized for the past three Thursday mornings I've wondered the same things. A four-day work week lives inside of me somewhere though I have never really had such a luxury except when I worked part time while completing my MFA.

Then it was all about my butt in a chair, though I tempered all the writing with long, strenuous walks through the woods or on the beach. Now my days are filled with teaching and long, vigorous walks with Rubin through the streets of Seattle neighborhoods or along Lake Washington. I love those walks, but it doesn't leave me much time to put my seat in my seat.

But here I am, butt planted, and I'm struggling to find a topic. This is perhaps the tough thing about discipline. As a (former) athlete, discipline made sense. Get up, run, lift weights, practice drills, eat, stretch, eat some more, then go to bed tired and satisfied. Writing doesn't feel so regimented. There are no exercises to complete, no training schedule to meet. Instead of being tired and satisfied, my head spins with too many thoughts about what needs to get done by the end of the school year and people I need to contact to make it all work.

I loved being in a writing program. There were assignments. There were expectations and those expectations were outside myself. I was motivated by tasks to complete and professors to please. Now it's just me, my own ideas, and my expanding butt in this often too firm chair.

The other day on NPR I listened to a man who had just published his first book. I caught only part of the story, half an ear focused in twelve different morning directions. But I heard him confess to two important commitments. First, he gave himself five years to do nothing but write. (He was 45 at the time.) Next, he decided to pull out his typewriter, his favorite stories written by some of his favorite writers and retype their work...actually hammer out on a manual typewriter stories already written by someone else. He told the interviewer that those two commitments grounded him in the discipline of being a writer and even though he only got four stories published in those five years, he grew as a writer in ways he'd never imagined.

Oh, and he recently published a novel.

In my MFA program we were required to choose five of our favorite writers and write an essay in their voice. It was the hardest assignment I had in my two years in the program, but one I know challenged me as well as improved my writing. If I remember right, I chose Terry Tempest Williams, Nancy Mairs, Kathleen Dean Moore, Caroline Knapp, and then I really challenged myself and chose Jamaica Kincaid. I'm not sure I pulled it off, but I don't think that was the point of the assignment. There was a magic in the assignment. I got to leave my head for an hour or two, immerse myself in the words of others, and then spend the next hour or three living their voice on the page.

Maybe because I've been a teacher for so long I have a desire for my own assignments. A teacher would be nice, too, but even just a list of writing assignments with due dates and page lengths. Perhaps that's what all those contests are about whose announcements show up in my email box every week or so from my MFA program. I haven't been bold enough to pursue them, but maybe soon, with my shift of focus in work and in time I should muster up the courage to enter a few.

But this discipline thing scares me. Can I do it on my own?

As of late, aside from the walking, my exercise discipline has been lacking. I've recently recommitted myself to stretches and strength training in addition to the seven or so miles Rubin and I pound out in our walks to school, around the 'hood, and back home again. Now that he's old enough, we've even taken to some jogging for a couple of minutes to raise my heart rate (definitely not his) and it feels good to feel the press of my lungs working and my legs straining. Still, it's nothing like what I used to do and perhaps that's a good thing since my former athlete's body is damaged from all those jumping exercises up the stadium steps and miles of running with a sore knee or a strained back.

Maybe that's the lesson in all of this. Discipline is one thing, but moderation is the other. Carving out time to write is important, but it will only work, past experience tells me, if I temper the journey with those long walks of the brain and the heart. If I can't have the assignments doled out each week, at least I can have the time to think along with the time in the chair.

Mark Doty, the poet, once said in a workshop I attended that when you get to the end of a poem you need to be surprised by the last line. You need to feel as if the last line showed up and you really had nothing to do with it. It arrives because it was time.

I like that image.

I'm ready to be surprised. I'm ready for it to arrive because I've given it time.

And in the end, Cheryl is dead on: I need to show up.