Several years ago, my colleagues and I brought the acclaimed poet Terrance Hayes to Columbia College Chicago for a reading. During the question-and-answer session afterward, one of our students described for Hayes her difficulty in constructing a steady, consistent writing schedule for herself.
“Writers always say you have to write every day. But do people actually do this?” she asked.
I recognized my younger self in her question. I remembered how difficult it was back in graduate school to reconcile my drive to be a writer with the fact that I simply didn’t know how to make the writing process a steady, habitual part of my life. Her question recalled all the times I attended readings as a student and wanted to hear a visiting writer take us through the pragmatic nuts-and-bolts details of their artistic practice. I never raised my hand and asked about this—insecurity and shyness on my part, afraid it was a question everyone else but me knew the answer to.
“I do try to write almost every day,” Hayes said. “I want to carve out enough time, maybe two or three hours at a sitting, to pay the kind of attention that the poems need.”
Then he paused and backed away slightly from the podium.
“Actually,” he continued, leaning back toward the microphone, “when I say I write for two or three hours at a time, what I really mean is that I might play video games for the first half-hour or an hour, just to loosen up, then I’ll write for the next couple hours. I don’t know many writers who can sit down at the computer and write for three hours straight.”
It’s still the best writing advice I’ve heard in my three decades of attending readings and hearing audience members ask about a writer’s work habits. Hayes described for the student a consistent writing schedule that is deliberately planned and organized. His reply depicted a schedule so attentive to the needs of the artistic imagination that it even included space for random, non-textual play.
Individual pieces of writing grow into manuscripts through steady, regular sessions of writing and revising. But the blunt reality is that very few of us, myself included, can write for a few hours every single day and balance all the other necessary demands of everyday life. Other people depend on us—our biological families, our chosen families, our friends, our neighbors—and if we want to live a full life, we can’t neglect them for our writing. Nor can we neglect our jobs, since our employers are, for most of us, our primary means of financial support and health insurance.
Rather than trying to force the writing time into a schedule that might not be able to accommodate it, I try to adapt the needs of my writing to the rhythms of my work life and personal life. All I ask of myself is that I maintain a continuity in my writing practice so that the shorter pieces I’m working on can develop, at the pace they need, into a larger whole.
It doesn’t matter whether this continuity unfolds daily, every other day, once per week, or every couple weeks. I can’t just write once in a while, here and there, waiting for the optimal environment of solitude and quiet to present itself. This kind of inconsistency makes it difficult for me to create a sustained, long-term relationship with my writing. When I go long periods without working on a project, I feel like I have to start everything from scratch when I return to it—like reconnecting with an old friend I haven’t seen in years and spending the entire visit just getting to know each other all over again.
If I don’t consciously schedule steady, regular time to write, then I risk losing the intimate connections I’ve nurtured with the sound and rhythm of my words, with my characters and personas, and most of all with the discovery process itself. And if I’m not discovering something new as I write, then it’s almost certain that my readers won’t, either.
Several months ago, my wife Liz and I went to dinner with an old friend, Nick, an art historian who was visiting from the west coast. He’d just read one of Liz’s most recent publications, an essay on the influence of a former high school writing teacher of hers, Mr. Jones, who died a couple years ago. Liz teaches English at the same high school she graduated from, and her essay explored how strange, and gratifying, it was to teach as a colleague alongside her first writing mentor. The essay appeared in the long-standing online magazine Identity Theory, and had been nominated that week by the journal for a Best of the Net award. We’d all just raised a toast to the nomination.
“We don’t always get to see the long-term effects we have on our students,” Nick said. “But it’s right there, in the story of you and your mentor—someone your English Department colleagues worked alongside, too. I hope they appreciated it.”
“It’s hard to say. A few of them texted me about it,” Liz said. “But not everyone in my department writes. I don’t talk to them much about—”
“High school teachers don’t have time to write,” Nick interrupted. “You have, what, five or six classes a day? Thirty of forty students in a class? Who has time to write anything with that kind of schedule?”
Liz paused. As she told me later, she knew that Nick was only trying to commiserate. But his remark still felt strange to her. High school teachers don’t have time to write—yet Liz makes the time. It’s difficult to schedule writing, but she does it.
It’s the same for me. My weeks at Columbia College Chicago are filled with curriculum planning, grading, committee meetings, and office-hour conferences, in addition to teaching and directing graduate theses, and I have to be intentional about finding time to write. During the academic year, neither of us can maintain a daily writing practice. If we did, we’d have little time for each other, let alone for the other people in our lives who depend on us, and whom we depend on.
But each of us does everything we can to schedule two or three writing sessions per week. We squeeze them in between classes when we can, or set aside writing time early in the morning, late at night, or on weekend afternoons. We’re both active on the major social media platforms, but we don’t post so much on social media that it saps the energy for our own writing. (Back in the early days of social media, I was so addicted to Facebook that I actually had to add a software app, LeechBlock, that would kick me off the site if I spent more than fifteen minutes at a time on it.) We don’t neglect our personal or teaching obligations, but we schedule the time in our weekly planners so that each writing session is as important as anything else we log in our schedules—social events, family gatherings, religious holidays, doctor’s appointments, and so on.
How many times per week we write is less important, for us, than making sure we are writing something each week. The regularity of the writing allows us the time to make discoveries as we write, to approach the drafting and revision process with the patience needed to discover, with precision, what we’re trying to say in our work.
“I find a way,” Liz said, eventually, to Nick. “I mean, I have to. With everything else on top of my full teaching load—class planning, grading, administrative meetings, student conferences—if I’m going to write, I have to schedule it. I don’t have a choice, if I want to have a life, too.”
Tony Trigilio’s newest book is Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023). His recent books of poetry are Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the 2020 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (2021), and Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX [books] 2019). A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in 2018 by Guatemala’s Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.