Author: Karen Odden

Some years ago, my friend Donna (kudos coming, D) and I were sharing stories about parenting, and she told me how there was a day she was rushing her two boys to get out the door, and one of them began having a full-on meltdown, as children do. She halted herself in her tracks and said, “Honey, take all the time you need.” The meltdown drew down several notches, and they got out the door, shoes, backpacks, and all. (Yes, I totally poached her approach for my own kids.)

That little story stuck with me because I felt something tip inside my own chest at the moment Donna said those words. They stirred up an ache. Because they were words I needed to hear myself.

Here’s a question — how many of us felt rushed as children? Hurry up and get your shoes on, hurry up and get out the door for school (or practice, or the dentist appointment, or whatever), hurry up and grow up. I’m not blaming parents — good grief, parenting is a full-on, busy endeavor, involving multitasking, conflicting needs, and bad traffic at exactly the wrong time. But I think it’s important to recognize when myths and messages imbibed in childhood are no longer relevant or helpful. 

This old pattern of “hurry up!” with the concurrent feeling of Dire Urgency (those caps are intentional) does not work well when it comes to writing. It makes me want to have a meltdown and throw my shoes against the wall. Paradoxically, the more I try to rush — the more attuned to some external clock and not the innermost feelings and thoughts of my characters — the less I get done and the blander and deader my prose. I might as well go to the kitchen and start dinner.

All this said, I am in the middle of editing my sixth book, and when I received my editor’s notes, I felt a moment of that Hurry Up Dire Urgency. (To be clear, it was not on her part; it was all in my head.) I took a breath. I reminded myself: these are edits on a book, not a life-saving medical treatment. And in fact, I have time — plenty of time. Weeks. Just because I have a deadline doesn’t mean it’s an unreasonable one. And in fact … I think my deadline is sometime in August, so … I’m good.

Deadlines are a matter of life — because other people are depending on us to finish our part of the project, so they can get to theirs. But I guess my musing for today is this: the mentality of “honey, take all the time you need” can help us push back at the personal myth that rushing is better and will get us wherever we’re going faster, or that some external schedule necessarily strips us of our ability to create. At any rate, wherever you are in your process, I wish you happy writing!

Years ago, when I was writing my first book with two young children at home, my writing time was fixed. I took my daughter to school, put my son down for a nap, wrote for two hours, then got my son out of his crib and picked up my daughter from school. My writing had fixed time boundaries.

Some years later, I did NaNoWriMo, which required me to write 50,000 words in November; I wrote around 2,300 words each day (some of it, admittedly, absolute dreck). I know authors who, for various reasons, set fixed goals (or limits) on their writing: one writes from 8-11 every morning; one aims for 3,000 words each day when drafting a book. What is important, of course, is that writers work in a way that suits them.

My approach has changed over the years. A set word count didn’t work all that well for me; I found myself increasingly detached from my characters’ feelings and experiences the more I focused on the word count. (Besides, I found myself resisting taking words out — and we all know that pruning the superfluous is nearly as important as writing the necessary!) Setting a fixed time felt different. At first, I liked the knowledge that I would sit down for a set time each day. The daily practice helped me to feel I was serious, committed, and doing something that would someday go somewhere. (That’s a lot of “some,” isn’t it?) But the more I came to think of myself as a writer, and the more I witnessed myself being committed to the practice, the less the fixed structure mattered. Now my writing is like water, flowing around other things — hiking, meeting a friend for lunch, running errands. I usually write every day for a few hours, especially when I’m developing that first draft or in revisions — but after years of writing, I have faith that even if I take two or three days off, I will eventually get back to my desk and put my fingers back on the keyboard. A good writing day is one where I lose myself in the manuscript for some period of time. 

For the writers out there — how do you work? What counts as a “good” writing day?