Know-Love-Obey God

High Calling Blogs Book Club:
The Right to Write:
An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life,
by Julia Cameron, Chapters 4-6
Laura Boggess leads our discussion (and links to other posts) here.

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“I think we should take the train for our east coast trip this time,” my husband said. Thus began a minor tug-of-war.

“But Southwest flies to Baltimore, non-stop, for the same price!” I retorted, imagining the complications of a long, long train trip (two nights, both ways, not in sleeping cars) compared to mere hours on a direct flight.

My husband, Charles the Adventurous, pointed out, “It’ll be the last chance we can take Derek on a trip like this, to see the country!”

Derek (age 11) piped in. “Well, I wouldn’t really see anything anyway, because I’ll be reading my book the whole time.” (Derek pulled on my side of the tug-of-war rope.)

After weeks—no, months of debating, including a possible compromise (train there, plane back), Charles won me over. We will be confined in a train for forty-three hours there and forty-three hours back.

After I realized what this means, I am now thoroughly excited about this train trip. I realized I can use this train time to write.

The “if-I-had-time” lie is a convenient way to ignore the fact that novels require being written and that writing happens a sentence at a time. Sentences can happen in a moment. Enough stolen moments, enough stolen sentences, and a novel is born—without the luxury of time.

- Cameron, page 14

Perhaps finding time to write is like living the way Ma and Pa Ingalls lived their Little House on the Prairie lives. They got creative and made do with what they had. (Remember when they made a balloon toy out of a pig’s bladder?) Finding time to write requires intentionality, determination, and that kind of creativity. I cannot write the way John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden—several hours every morning, six days a week. I need to be creative with my chunks of time, making do with what I have—the fifteen minutes here, the half an hour there, the long stretches of “brain time” when I am doing tasks but my mind is free (like waiting for a child to finish playing in the bath, or driving to piano lessons twenty minutes each way). It’s not a fancy, store-bought latex balloon, but the inflated pig’s bladder will have to do.

Like the train trip. Instead of automatically preferring to minimize our travel time, I should have thought more creatively from the very beginning (which would also have avoided the weeks-long plane/train debate). A true writer’s determination would have seen the train-time possibility sooner, and I now realize that I need to change the way I think. If I think differently and intentionally, I can write more. How can I trick the clock? How can I transform my daily time-chunks to my writing advantage?

I don’t have many ideas yet, but I’ll be on the lookout for new ideas and opportunities.

And certainly, my pen and writing book will be with me on the Amtrak.