How I spend my time on residency
Fran Magazine: Issue #130
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The election
Here are three good pieces I’ve read in the wake of last week.
- in Notebook: “Voters care about what you can do for them. You can’t win an election by threatening to lose.”
- in scream: “To teach a child that words only exist to tell them what the right and wrong paths to go down is to rob them of entire places to go within themselves. Instead, what they come to learn is that stories are there to make them better people; a transaction above all.”
On with the circus
When I go on residency, as I did once to Boise and the Adirondacks and now Washington, I’m inevitably asked by friends back home as well as organizers and participants what I do all day. Not quite a vacation and not quite working remote, a residency often puts me in a position of trying to figure out what my version of “writer’s routine” actually looks like. Whenever I see old routines or schedules for writers — or more often composers — of, say, the late 19th and early 20th century, I’m overwhelmed by the extent of their productivity and how long lunch takes (two hours??). Now that I’ve done this a few times, I’ve more or less developed a schedule that works for me. Here is what it looks like.
Mornings
With the time difference mostly working in my favor, I wake up anywhere between 6:30 and 8:30, with a haphazard alarm set at 8am on weekdays just to be safe I only slept until my alarm once since I’ve been out here, and on weekends I sleep in as late as my body will let me.1
I brush up and I make coffee. If it’s a day where I’m running (three or four days a week) I’ll drink at least half of my coffee,2 and then I’ll go for a run.3 On days when I don’t run, I start reading and I try to read for about an hour or do somewhere between 50-100 pages. If I get on my computer before I start reading, I never start reading. I avoid email, I try not to get too bogged down in texts, just reading in natural light as best I can.
The books I brought with me, bolded by what’s been read:
Loved & Missed, Susie Boyt
Excellent Women, Barbara Pim
Festival and Game of the Worlds, Cesar Aires (two novellas)
The Driver’s Seat, Muriel Spark
If Only, Vigdis Hjorth
Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner
Molly, Blake Butler
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
I’ve also bought a few books — mostly poetry — here in town. The first three I’ve yet to get to are newish releases (or translations, in the case of the Hjorth) I’d yet to get around to yet. Pale Fire has followed me around on a number of trips. In fact, I thought I lost it and then it turned up in a long-stored piece of luggage. Is this the trip where I finally get to Pale Fire? Probably not… but you never know.
Sometime between 10 and 11 in the morning, I’ll finally sit down to start writing at the computer. When I was in Boise, I was averaging about 3,000 words of writing per day. When I was in the Adirondacks (pre-mono diagnosis), I was averaging about 4,000 words of writing per day. This past week, I’ve been averaging about 2,500 words. I think 4,000 was way too many — a lot of what I’ve been doing here is editing those words from the summer — but 2,500-3,000 feels about right, especially when it’s generative (first draft) writing where I am less stressed about the look and feel and it’s more about getting all the garbage out of my system so I can figure out what’s really going on in the edit. I don’t write every day when I’m on residency, but I write most days, at least five a week, regardless of weekday or weekend (everything blurs together). The first few days of any residency are the least productive, kind of by design: my body is tired from travel and disoriented, sleep is ???, I’m not in the right headspace to do a lot of creative work. I work day-long breaks into the schedule where I catch up on other stuff or otherwise just relax and read all day, which is pretty heavenly. I don’t know until I’m awake for a bit whether or not it’s going to be a productive day, but usually once I know, it’s hard to go in the other direction. Yesterday, for instance, was NOT at all productive. Fine!
But on a writing day, I write in the morning until I’ve hit about 1,000 words, maybe 1,500 if I’m feeling loose.4 Sometimes I do this while having oatmeal. Sometimes the oatmeal comes after.
An aside about oatmeal
From late 2019 through fall of 2020 — let’s say a year — I had the same oatmeal for breakfast every single day. I can’t recommend doing this highly enough. I have always been annoying and picky about food in the morning, and my whole life is easier if I just have the same thing every single day.
Afternoon
I usually wrap up my morning writing sometime around 2pm. If I finish early, I take a pretty significant break — either go back to reading, play a game on the computer, work on jigsaw puzzle, or scroll on phone for a bit. I have also been slowly but surely moving through Twin Peaks: The Return.
Between 2 and 3, I’ll go for a walk. We’re lucky enough to be very close to the water, so usually I go down to the beach to see if anything interesting has washed up. I am always on the lookout for these beached (dead, I think?) lion’s mane jellyfish. Sorry to post dead wildlife here but I think they’re too interesting not to see.
In Boise, I was lucky enough to be staying right off the Boise River Greenbelt, a long paved trail that went from my house right into downtown Boise in one direction or deep into the woods in the other direction. I used to walk that trail for a good hour to two hours every single day, catching up on podcasts or talking to people on the phone. If I recall correctly, I was listening to Lin-Manuel Miranda talk about Tick, Tick… Boom!5 when suddenly a woman near me on the trail gasped and fell to her knees and I thought, okay, time for something bad to happen… but it was actually that a bald eagle had landed on a big rock in the middle of the river. Not something you see every day!
At some point post-walk, I’ll go back to reading for a bit. Ideally I am always going from book (physical) into writing, rather than “dicking around on MacBook” into writing. Back at home or off-residency, I’m usually not that lucky. I’ll try to read for another half hour or 50 pages, and then I’ll try to finish up my word count for the day.
Evening
Phil or I cook dinner. Or we go out, but mostly we cook easyish meals without too many moving parts. If I haven’t finished my word count for the day, I’ll go back to writing. This is the main difference between my schedule back home and my schedule on residency: when I am on residency I work at night without hesitation. Back home, in the swing of every day life, I really, really try to shut my laptop at 6pm and not go back to it unless I have to. On residency, I find the peace and quiet of the living situation usually affords me a nice chunk of time to write in the evening. When I was in the Adirondacks, I was writing from about 10pm to midnight most nights. I basically haven’t lived like that since I was in my early twenties, but it worked best for me: the nights were quiet and cool and the Internet was dysfunctional.
If I’m not working at night, however, Phil and I will typically play a game of Scrabble. I had previously gone on the record as “hating Scrabble” on account of:
being the member of my family who is worst at the game and inevitably being forced to endure some friendly mid-game shit-talking that implies I ought to be better at Scrabble because I majored in English
years of playing Words with Friends on Facebook against my mom (against whom I would lose) and a former on/off fling who was more likely to play a move on Words with Friends than reply to my text (against whom I would also lose)
I have lost five or six games to Phil and I have won one. Do I still hate Scrabble? Not really — but I am not very good though steadily improving. Maybe they (“they”) are onto something when they (??) say that habit-forming takes daily work…
Then we watch an episode of Detroiters and go to bed.
I used to be able to function on somewhere between five and six hours of sleep… post-mono, that’s less the case and I find I do need eight… or even sometimes a decadent nine hours… of sleep in order to focus during the day.
I am one of those people for whom the act of drinking a cup of coffee takes, generously, three or four hours.
I basically always run on an empty stomach, though when I’m doing the kinds of runs that require mid-run fueling, I won’t hold back. On race days I’ll sometimes have a banana before I go out, but that’s usually just because there’s so much waiting around time. I try not to dick around in the morning as best as possible or else I find I get pissed off later in the day.
I probably usually write between 1,000-2,000 words for three or four days in a usual work week.
It’s giving “2021 was a different time.”
this is basically serving 19th century vibes honey 🔥☕️ and i’m sipping it !!
"If I get on my computer before I start reading, I never start reading." now aint that the truth !!!!