My sworn enemy, the laptop battery, reminded me I had 90 minutes to write this. The charging cord is at home on my desk, and the cats are probably chewing on it. Already, the battery says that 90 minutes was a roughshod approximation, and I better create and hunt and peck faster than I ever have, sucker. Okay, sure. I’m up for it.
Part of me dies every time I watch a film montage of a character writing a novel. The only distinction in these quick glimpses into the creation of a masterpiece is the writing instrument used: quill and ink, typewriter, word processor or laptop. With a smirk, I watch rapid-fire typing, a look of glee or divine focus on the writer’s face. Cut to a few wads of paper with a bottle of whiskey or a steaming cup of coffee in the foreground. Forgiving the time compression given to cinematic retellings of events, the novel is done in three minutes. The heroic dispenser of great literature leans back in their chair and smiles with the peacefulness of a job well done. Bullshit. Bullshit. And horseyshit.
Dude or dudette didn’t even edit. No literary babies were killed. The author never stared into the distance wondering why he’d ever thought he could write. The Pulitzer wannabe never had a sad moment explaining that this project was the last attempt at getting published.
If you’re like me, and I hope there are others like me, writing is hard.
Oftentimes, I even hate it. It’s hard to find the time. Difficult to remember where you left off sometimes because, well, life. Every once in a great while, you get presented with a couple of hours of unbroken writing time. Every great once in a while. Maybe you have kids, a busy work schedule or too many personal endeavors. Or maybe fear has you “sharpening pencils” but never really getting to the business of writing. When your ass isn’t in the chair, the writing isn’t getting done. Whatever the reason, my point finally is, you must adapt to what you’re provided with.
Adaptation is one of our species’ greatest survival tools. Adapt or die. So, I’ve become a guerrilla writer. I attack the keys when I get a chance. I hit it, retreat back to life. Strike the next opportunity I get.
But, after the retreat back to life, the intel becomes hazy. The strategy has got lost in those counterattacks sometimes called your children, your job, your day-to-day BS.
After too many times of resuming my work only to get my ass out of the seat almost immediately due to frustration, I adapted. I had to let go of the fact that I have a life outside of the lives I create. The first thing I had to do was forgive myself. It does not make me any less of a writer than that jerk in the film montages. It does not make me any less of a writer that I may only get an hour lunch break, which turns into half that time due to office interruptions. It’s what I do with that time I am granted that matters. Less is more, they say. Right?
I changed how I ended my writing sessions and retooled how I started each fresh, golden opportunity for literary greatness.
Every time you sit down, you have a better chance than all your friends who have “thought about writing a book someday.” Okay, sure, you will.
When I stop a writing session, I write some bullet-point notes for myself. It doesn’t matter how lengthy these notes are, but they serve to navigate me back to my thought process before the dog decided it had to go potty. When I resume writing, I will ignore these notes. There’s a process; trust me.
Depending on the length of my absence from this better-world-in-progress, I go back several pages. My average rewind is usually around five pages. Next, I perform light editing of those rewound pages. This reimmerses me in my world — the emotion, the tone and the characters. When those shined-up bullets come into view down the page, I can more easily rearm and continue with the time I have left. Back to the fight.
Is writing easier when you can begin writing a short story and spend hours with it? Maybe. Maybe not. I contend that some moments of reflection and hard truths can reorient the writing and even snuff out a project needing a pillow held over its face.
When my wife is out of town on a trip, I have all the time in the world to write — get what I want. Right? I can write and write until my fingertips and wrists hurt, my eyes sting and the too many cups of coffee start belching. But, no. It doesn’t happen. Guerrilla writing has become my thing. My kids have grown. My dog has passed. My work has slowed — I’m retiring soon. I’m feeling old for a writer who hasn’t published that Great American Novel yet. Whatever that is. I don the armor of the guerrilla writer and wait for my next retreat, knowing I’ll be back.
Sometimes, I even find myself creating disruption. While writing this in a coffee house, I deliberately forgot the charging cord for my old laptop with the tired battery. The battery claimed I had 90 minutes to create greatness. The minutes trickled away like some trick of time in a Christopher Nolan movie. Ninety minutes is a lie. My battery is critical. Plug in now, the battery says. The joke’s on you, battery. I’ve just finished my draft. It is time to retreat. And I shall return.
Born and raised in central Illinois in a hardened mining town that died after the coal mine shut down, and having worked 13 years in a prison, Gary Smothers has developed a unique, though warped, sense of the world that bleeds through in his writing. His fiction and creative nonfiction writing have appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Dogwood: Journal of Poetry and Prose, The Binnacle, Book of Matches and See Spot Run, among others.
