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!