An Ideal Writing Day?

Does it exist? What does it look like? Trying to figure it out by Friday...

Life is about to change, at least a little. To make more space and time for writing, I’m shifting to a 4-day work week at my day job. Longer work days Monday through Thursday in exchange for writing Fridays. And it starts this week!

It all happened kind of quickly, once I figured out what I needed and asked for it. (That part took a long, long time.) Now I’m feeling excited and also a bit nervous.

Aside from a two-week residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2018, I have never had full weekdays to write. It’s always been squeezed into the early mornings or the subway commutes or around weekend commitments. Even at VSC, there were scheduled mealtimes and readings and talks to work around. I’ve gotten very good at writing in short bursts, within confines. I don’t think I could sit in a chair and write for eight hours even if I wanted to; that muscle has never been exercised.

At the same time, it’s not just writing time that’s been missing from my life lately, but also reading time, art time, nature time. So I’m thinking about structuring my newly free Fridays in chunks — for example, an hour of writing followed by a museum exhibit followed by another two hours of writing, with a long walk through the park on either side. Balancing the writing with things that fuel the writing. Writing in different locations. Experiencing New York City again.

How do other people who have organized their lives around creative pursuits structure their days? This is a real question — if you are someone who has full writing days, I’d love your advice.

I’ll let you all know how it goes…

ALSO! The episode of Art of the Short featuring my short story Bear debuted earlier this week. The co-hosts of this podcasts had a lot of fun with it. If you want 21 minutes of laughs, give it a listen.