Write Now

I should be on the roof or in the crawl space or getting the oil changed or fighting blackberry bushes or risking my identity on social media or posting at joecsmolen.com. Or has it been too long, and I need to call her - or him? I have a letter that needs to be answered. Replying to e-mails, I can never stand to just click on “How can I help you?” or “That sounds great!” Isn’t it time for the dog to go out again? I have You Tube how-to research to do instead. Always. I can always always hear the pounding feet of guilt just a couple of seconds behind me.

No. I flat don’t have time to write.

But I do.

I don’t set a time every day or a certain word count to blap out, or watch the clock until I have put in my minimal 90 minutes. I just make writing a big priority and keep nudging the timid little thing to the head of the line until it squeaks out, “Can I? Please? I wanna,” and then I just sit down and give it a chance to say something.

I find writing time mostly by being ruthless. The list of things that shred our time is big and hungry, but that list has two edges because the very fact that all that stuff is breathing down our necks for attention yells at us, yells I say, to grab ahold of our RIGHT NOW! Van Halen yells out a song that hammers home the importance to each of us of RIGHT NOW!

So I know we have a passle we have to attend to just to maintain credit score and so, concomitantly, I know that if we are going to have time to write, we have to do it RIGHT NOW!

But you may be thinking more viscerally than that. You may be thinking that if you start into a story or a novel or essay, because of your age, you could time-out before you finish. That is a hell of a thing, because it doesn’t really matter if you never finish. What matters is the heat in your heart RIGHT NOW and if you are wanting heat in your heart RIGHT NOW and if you get going RIGHT NOW and you do follow your nagging inclination and you do write, you will earn a lot of days where you will have to live with an incredible feeling of elation for the literal beauty of what you have just written. There is nothing similar to that feeling and you can have it if you just – well, get real specific about what you want to express and you write it out simply, clearly and succinctly.

Many writers like to quote professionals or celebrities. Take George Foreman. He was viewed as twenty years too old to win the World Heavy Weight Championship a second time. But he did. He was 45. The biggest publicity he got over the whole thing was because of what he said to a sports reporter,

“You are never too old.”

Or too young.