Focus: Writing and Engaging

Last Friday, I finished my MFA semester work and emerged blinking like a teenager at noon into the post-election world.* During those days of deep writing, I have again had the chance to guest post at The Write Practice–this time about metaphors–and the estimable Donna Thompson has featured my colleague Jenny Zia and me on her Women Influencing the Arts blog.

Taking the time to engage with the broader writing community has upped my focus on time management. Two months ago I promised myself I’d experiment with craft learning in the evenings, followed by a morning practice of that craft. I was looking at complex-compound sentences at the time. And I thought I’d experiment for about a month and then share what I found.

Noting the irony inherent in claiming to have focused on time management but not having met a self-imposed deadline, here’s what I found: I can write after three in the afternoon. In fact, some days I generate powerful first-draft material in the afternoon. But learning writing craft before I go to bed? Not so much. Maybe this is because I exhaust my focus muscle during a day of writing, or because my metabolism prefers dawn to night at this point in my life. But what I found is that evenings are a great time for me to catch up on reading my Writer’s Chronicle and Poets & Writers and the interviews in The Paris Review. In fact, sometimes the ideas I find in those sources jump-start my next-day’s free write. Plus: I don’t spend precious daytime focus hours reading about writing.

* Re: the election, from my FB reply to a friend: I walked in the woods and cried a little and when I looked up, a leaf was floating slowly slowly slowly down down down in that stop start and swirl way that leaves do and then . . . it landed in the uppermost branches of a sapling; it did not fall to the forest floor. And I thought: we will be held through this. Blessed be. Blessed unrest. Blessed be the peacemakers.

Have you played around with your writing life schedule? I’d love to hear what you’ve done, and how it worked — I’m especially curious to know if things have shifted for you at different life stages. Let me know in the comments section below.