Walter Mosley, author of the acclaimed Easy Rawlins mysteries, has said that you need at least an hour and half at a time to get any writing done—writing for publication, that is, writing intended to edify anybody besides yourself. John Gardner, author of Grendel and many other fine books, including two very authoritative tomes on writing, has said that when you really get in the flow you’ll need twelve to sixteen hours at a stretch to just plunge in and stay there, even if you have a family; and if you do have a family, “you should feel bad about this.” The unwritten coda is, But you should do it anyway.
But what about all the stay-at-home parents out there who have written poems and stories and even novels a few furtively snatched minutes at a time? I believe that they, and many other writers who can work in bursts, in fits and starts, prove Gardner and Mosley wrong. Maybe it’s easier to work in longer segments; but that of course depends on your having the longer segments available. What if you don’t? Are you doomed not to write?
Well, not this writer. I’m going to learn how to write in whatever time is available to me. The time’s length is not the issue. The time’s quality is not the issue. The time’s availability is the issue. As any writer will attest, time itself is a fundamental issue for writers. Which is why it makes a good topic for Five-Minute Friday.
To unfold the secrets of the space-time continuum:
1. Write for five minutes, using the topic as an initial prompt. Feel free to deviate from the topic, and feel free to write for longer than five minutes, too.
2. Don’t stop to edit. Don’t worry about typos or grammar or even the quality of the writing. Dig deep or skim the surface, but keep those hands moving for five solid minutes.
3. Feel free to send me your piece to be posted. You can post as a comment on this post, or you can send it to me via the Contact Me link on the main page. I’m happy to post your piece anonymously or pseudonymously, if you wish. This thread will be moderated to ensure a criticism-free zone.
Ready? Five minutes. Go!
i once heard someone refer to “the little men who slow down time,” an educated person, a non-religious, non-credulous person, but someone who believed that somehow when you get your head in the right place you can enlist the aid of supernatural beings who will help you get to work on time even when you leave the house later than you should–a big issue in the Atlanta commute. she didn’t have a specific mythology worked out. she had not heard of these little men from somewhere else or someone else. but she believed in them nonetheless. it makes sense that time can slow down or speed up, in theory, just as it makes sense that space can stretch, contract, or curve, as the theory of relativity tells us; because space and time really are part of the same continuum, and under the right conditions it’s a plastic continuum, not a static one. but the question is, how do you stretch space? how do you slow down time? how do you enlist the aid of the little men? for me it seems to have something to do with penetrating more deeply within the time that you experience. some sense of enfoldment, of a fundamental pervasion within each second of time, udnerstanding that the seconds themselves are artificial divisions that we impose upon our experience of time, just as nations are artificial divisions that we impose upon the continents. but if you try to understand the actual time within the seconds, if you can plunge within time and try to swim within it and perhaps even grow gills so that you don’t have to come up–that’s how you can find the spaciousness within time.
Time .. Whether spent writing or in doing other things . . . It’s all valuable in one way or another whether we take the tome to acknowledge it.
32 years had flown by without blinking, and this week I was suddenly back in the spring of 1979. An abrupt announcement in a phone message — she had a massive heart attack and they had to pull the plug — in parallel to the one back then — Johnnie Wiley had a cerebral aneurysm on Sunday and was rushed to Durham Regional. Both statements voiced by the same person as calmly as someone else might say “the sun came up on time this morning.”
This week I was right back at Durham Regional, in the sane ICU, a pale white face in a sea of black ones. Reminded of an early morning when Plunk befuddled the large security guard by telling him in no uncertain terms “She’s my sister!” to guarantee my right to go with her to see “our” mother before her life-changing brain surgery. This week I was the person who realized that Plunk herself was gone, her skin cool to the touch, no gurgles of breath, no slow and steady heartbeat — gone at 57– 3 days after the life-support respirator had stopped breathing for her. Time stood still that afternoon as first her brother then her mother and cousins and fiancée arrived to cry or wail or stand silently on the hall.
Thank you for sharing this, Linda. I’m really sorry for your loss.