January 25, 2012

Do you long for a quieter time in history when it was easy to be a writer?

Do you imagine writing for hours at a sidewalk cafe in Paris? Maybe your ideal is scribbling in a journal beside Walden Pond…

Dream On!

A couple of years ago, when I visited the homes of C. S. Lewis [his writing room is below] and Jane Austen [her writing desk is above], I think I left with a MISperception. Homes turned into museums are clean, uncluttered, and very quiet. People move about slowly, and they almost whisper, as if they’re at a shrine.

My Misperception?

I think that I left their homes believing that Lewis and Austen had it easier than we writers have it today. Just think of the interruptions alone that hadn’t been invented! In Oxford (Lewis) and at Chawton (Austen), neither writer had Facebook, the Web, Twitter, YouTube videos, email to answer, or newsletters and spam to wade through.

They also had peace and quiet. Jane Austen was living in a small village, and Lewis’ home was, at the time, situated in the middle of eight acres (which included a pond and woods). Bliss!

And they weren’t hurried in their writing. Neither author typed, but wrote everything by hand. Think of the satisfying scritch-scratch of pen on paper, sitting alone in a quiet office, with no demands on their time at home except to write.

Reality Check

As I mentioned last time, I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’ Letters to Children. I was reading a rather apologetic letter he wrote to one girl in late December, 1956.

“…I’ve really been snowed under. All domestic help was away for its holidays. I have a very sick wife to visit daily in hospital. [Joy Lewis had cancer, and he went by train.] At home I had to look after a sick brother, 2 schoolboy stepsons, one dog, one cat, four geese, umpteen hens, two stoves, three pipes in danger of freezing; so I was pretty busy and pretty tired.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had to deal with distractions like daily train rides to the hospital, hens and geese, literally keeping the home fires burning in a house with no central heat, frightened stepchildren… Not exactly the life I had been imagining for C. S. Lewis.

And Jane? She never had a room of her own in which to write. She shared a bedroom, as she had her whole life, with her sister. The frugal manner that she, her sister, and her mother were forced to live meant that servants were at a minimum. The physical tasks of running a home in the early 1800′s was back-breaking labor compared to what we do today to cook, clean, and launder. The Austen ladies also raised much of their own food and kept huge vegetable gardens, a big orchard, and chickens.

Finding time to write was NEVER easy.

Like all writers, past and present, C. S. Lewis and Jane Austen had to find the time to write in the midst of difficult, busy lives. Yes, it was different back then. But it’s never been easy.

“The sober truth is that any of us can find the time to write a book, no matter the schedule of unstoppable events in our life,” says David Whyte, author of The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationships. “The greatest, most prized excuse for a writer is the lament over our lack of time in which to write. It is a false and paper-thin defense against another more difficult, underlying dynamic: the inability to have the will to find the time. It is quite sobering to find with experience that if we write only a hundred words a day–a normal paragraph–we will have a book of ninety thousand words in three years.”

On the busy days when I’m grabbing fleeting moments to write, I need to give up my “it shouldn’t BE this way!” moaning and groaning. We can set boundaries on our time and make schedules–both excellent ideas–but real life happens. And when it does, remember Jane Austen and C.S. Lewis. We’re in good company. Thankfully, they wrote anyway.

8 Comments »

1. 

   Responses to comments below:

   Vijaya, I ended up buying the book about literary ladies, and it arrived today. Can’t wait to get into it! Great way to spend my amazon gift card. You would love Katherine Paterson’s A SENSE OF WONDER too, a collection of her speeches.

   Cheri, everything in us rebels at the idea of writing one or two paragraphs per day accomplishing anything. We need to take it on faith and just keep plugging along! The daily habit–even just a bit at a time–is a powerful way to write.

   Jennifer, you’re welcome!

   Christie, the only word our flesh really seems to understand is “more, more!” Enough is never enough, and cutting back to something that is more do-able is so hard to do! And yet, we’d be so much more content and feel so much more successful if we took our time.

   Jeanne, when I only had an hour to write per day when my kids were little, I did a lot of “pre-thinking” while doing housework and laundry and gardening, working out plotting problems, etc. I didn’t go to my closet office to write until I knew I had something to say. Like you said, you can’t use up all your writing time just getting focused!

   Comment by Kristi Holl — January 25, 2012 @ 12:41 pm

2. 

   Kristi, how very true about MAKING the time to write. But you will find that the majority of commercially successful writers had some sort of help or they never married, had children to care for. Of course, there are the exceptions like Harriet Beecher Stowe, but I think you might enjoy a book by Nava Atlas — Literary Ladies. I blogged about it here: http://vijayabodach.blogspot.com/2011/07/reading_25.html

   Comment by Vijaya — January 25, 2012 @ 7:45 pm

3. 

   I will go read that…I remember once realizing that my favorite female authors (Austen, the Brontes, Alcott) had all been unmarried and without children. On the other hand, Katherine Paterson’s books are so wonderful, and she credits having a busy life full of children as giving her a reason to write. I try to take that attitude instead!

   Comment by Kristi Holl — January 26, 2012 @ 7:04 am

4. 

   “Katherine Paterson’s books are so wonderful, and she credits having a busy life full of children”

   Oh, yes, agreed. I’d be a lab rat without my children. I love Paterson’s book; The Gates of Excellence.

   Comment by Vijaya — January 26, 2012 @ 5:25 pm

5. 

   Thanks for the encouragement. I’ve heard that C.S. Lewis’s room was always a filthy disaster zone, too, yet he managed to write anyway.
   It is very encouraging to remember that just a little work consistently over a long time is just as effective as a lot of work in a big spurt.

   Comment by Cheri — January 26, 2012 @ 7:04 pm

6. 

   What a great perspective and time and the writing life. Thanks for sharing!

   Comment by Jennifer Rumberger — January 28, 2012 @ 2:22 pm

7. 

   Thanks for the fun post. I think we CAN make the time to write. The problem comes from, at least for me, wanting to always do MORE. More, more, MORE! A 90,000 book in three years just isn’t enough, right? We want two of them in ONE year. But you’re right. Three years for one book is certainly better than not writing at all. And maybe someday someone will say about us, “Thankfully, they wrote anyway.”

   Comment by Christie Wild — January 30, 2012 @ 9:23 am

8. 

   Thanks for sharing these insights. For me, I find it’s more about my own lack of focus, the way I let life distract me from the voice of my story as well as my actual writing. Fifteen minutes a day could work if I sat down with a clue what to write in that fifteen minutes. My problem is that it takes me fourteen of those minutes to get my head back in the story.
   Ah, well. Need to work on that.

   Comment by Jeanne — January 31, 2012 @ 4:34 am

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