Making time for fiction

Your real life doesn’t matter to fiction. Yes, your spouse or significant other is important. Yes, it’s a big deal that you’ve got a good job (maybe even a good job that you like or a shitty job that you hate). Yes, you’ve got pets and family and traffic and drama and a social life to deal with. But none of that matters to fiction.

There was a man I once knew who was touched. He was a poet and a songwriter and beautiful and brilliant. He was actually the man who inspired me to start writing down the wordherds floating through my mind and organizing them into something that mattered to me, and might someday matter to someone else. He wrote amazing poetry, poetry that spoke to me and to everyone who heard it – which is pretty impressive when you consider his audience was largely made up of high school dropouts. I met him at a coffee shop and got to know him better when everyone at the coffee shop went into a frenzy over his poetry; we were helping him edit and organize a manuscript for publication, going through chapbooks and notebooks and stacks of stained napkins finding the best of what he had and trying our best to make it better. The manuscript got accepted and my poet friend got paid, but the book was never printed and eventually he got fired from the coffee shop. A few months after that he started waiting tables at Denny’s. A few years after that he started managing the Denny’s. Now he’s the manager of a different Denny’s, he doesn’t write, he doesn’t sing, he’s getting married and is very happy and I’m fairly certain that the dark-eyed young punk who scribbled poems on beer coasters is dead inside of him, or is shrunk so small that he’ll never find his way out into the sunshine again.

He didn’t make time for fiction.

Let me make something perfectly clear here: art isn’t easy. People watch me drawing or read my poems or hear me planning out essays and say “Wow, you should be an artist,” “Why don’t you write novels?” or “You should be famous” to me all the time. I usually nod, smile, and thank them then go back to work on my real life silently asking myself what people think art is – do they think it’s automatic, do they think that I can sit down and dictate a full novel (or even a full short story or a single-stanza poem) to a word processor and call it a day? Well I can’t. And I don’t know anyone who produces perfect first drafts 100% of the time. Once in a while there’s a fluke, and you spit out a perfect poem or someone pitches you a softball essay topic that is easily completed, but that’s once in a while, not every time. Art is work and art takes effort, multiple angles of attack on a project, and a good deal of time.

I got a new job recently; it’s not my ideal job but it’s a pretty good gig – there are advantages to having an okay, well-paying job but I’m finding myself in the same boat as my used-to-be-a-poet friend and I’m having trouble making time for fiction.

This weekend, because it was so long, gave me a chance to sit down and write. I didn’t write perfectly, and I’ve been feeling pretty rusty when I’m trying to churn out pages and paragraphs, but I’ve had a few things to help me along. I have excellent fiction to read and to help inspire me (currently it’s a Neil Gaiman short story collection) and I have my friend’s sad story to carry as a totem and a talisman.

Even though it’s hard, even though I’m feeling rusty, and even though I’m short on time I don’t want to end up lost. His brooding poet persona is hidden away, probably for good, and I won’t let that happen to the angry, pierced, pink-haired girl with something to say who’s hiding behind my pinstriped skirts and sensible flats; she demands light and attention, she demands a space in my life, and she demands that I make time for fiction.

You don’t need a muse, you don’t need divine inspiration, you don’t need a novel to simply fall into your head. If you’re losing time for your art just think about what first made you want to create: who were you, what drove you, and who’s that person inside of you still peeking out onto the page – you’ll find what you need looking at yourself, and you’ll know the value of choosing to prioritize your time in order to give that person a voice.