Everyone has had one of those days - you get up with what you think is a full day, and, before you can get out of the house, your whole day gets emptied. Work calls off everyone for an exterminator, your lunch date cancels, and your kids are going to a sleep over right after school,
The whole day is yours. With Not A Damned Thing on your calendar.
For some, this is a temptation to engage in guilty pleasures - a mid-day glass of wine and a trashy novel, or binging on that embarrassing TV show you absolutely love. For others, The List looms, and by the end of the day, the supplies and makings of every project are stacked everywhere. You may even work on some of them. Others will get on the phone and/or social media, connecting and commenting. Some, unfamiliar with the freedom, will wander from one possibility to the other, never quite sure which to pursue.
For a writer, it can depend on where you are - in your process, with a project, in your confidence. It may not take you a moment to pour a cup of tea (or gather up your cat, or light a smoke) and sit down to your writing table, delighted to dig into the next scene or paragraph. It may mean some long walks or drives, or whatever you do to help your brain generate, as you try to decide what to work on, or how to change the direction of a piece you’re working on, or to consider just that next perfect line. Or….
Maybe you stand, knowing the day is a gift, knowing you should be using it to move your work forward, but not knowing how to do that. Any of these responses can leave the writer unmoored. You’re a writer, free time should find you ready to go, pen in hand, ideas flowing, not…. Mired.
I’m about to give you some advice for those unexpected free times. I’m not claiming I am always able to do this myself, I’m just saying that when I am able to, it works. On days like this, do two things: Let go, and Pay Attention. Let go of the need to make yourself a writer in this time, let go of the sense that your worth depends on how you handle it, let go of expectations that you must produce to be valid. Pay attention to … well, everything. Openly, quietly, without expectation. What you hope for is surprise. It may or may not happen. Don’t worry. Just let the free day (or the free hour or afternoon) percolate as it will. If you have the urge to sit down with your writing, do it, don’t resist, but also don’t resist if it seems like a long walk is the way to go. Those familiar, unsurprising, uneventful days may have a moment or an hour that will come back to you a week or a month or even years later with just the inspiration that you need for that next line.
I’m not saying that, if you have a routine, you should abandon it. I’m saying the free time is a gift, and while fourteen pages of your novel produced would make you feel great, so might the three-minute conversation with the guy you meet on the walking path, or the graffiti you find scrawled on a sidewalk.
