Time passing
On letting work happen according to its own schedule.
Dear friends,
I’m in limbo. The first draft of my book manuscript, as I triumphantly told you last month, is complete. The research and the creative work are over, mostly. But the next phase—revising the book and seeing it through to publication—hasn’t really begun. I’m still waiting for feedback from one reader. A final decision needs to be made about the publication date. And there are a million odds and ends to tie up, not the least of which is securing permission to quote from all the unpublished sources—mainly correspondence—that I hope to use in the book.
This in-between phase is difficult for most of us to inhabit comfortably, I think—and not just in writing. Forget Ozempic: productivity is the panacea that contemporary American culture promotes most fanatically. We spend our days “pushing things forward” or “keeping it moving.” We get a dopamine kick from checking off items on our to-do lists. Apps structure our days into 30-minute Pomodoros or segment our projects into bite-size tasks. My college-student son, who enjoys experimenting with ChatGPT and its ilk, just told me about a new AI-based program that will help you find time in your schedule for all the things you want to do.
I’m a Type A personality and a planner. I use a Hobonichi Techo to track yearly, monthly, and weekly goals. I get up at 5 or 6 a.m. most days to “get ahead of things” before my youngest child wakes up. I’ve experimented with time tracking to figure out how long I spend on social media and other distractions. Even my productivity has productivity goals: I listen to a planning podcast to learn how to do it better.
But I decided to try to get comfortable in limbo. After all, I may be here for a while. Rather than rev myself into a frenzy trying to wring every last moment out of my working hours, I did my best to pause. With the exception of a few tasks, I largely put my manuscript aside for a month. I worked on a totally unrelated project: an essay about new interpretations of Frankenstein that I hope to publish in the next few months. My family and I took an extended trip abroad, during which I did not get up early. At our Airbnb, someone had left a copy of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks on the shelf. I read the first chapter and put it back.1
A few months ago, a student came to me in distress, wanting to know if there was a way she could learn how to read faster. She was able to complete all the reading for class, but it was taking longer than she expected. As it happens, I’m a naturally fast reader. As a child, I raced through books at a rate that astonished my parents and teachers. But especially as I’ve gotten older, I don’t retain what I’ve read as well as I could. I once took down a book that I thought I hadn’t read yet and found my own notes in it.
This student, a woman in her thirties who had decided to get an MFA in writing after another successful creative career, always spoke slowly and deliberately, taking the time she needed to formulate her comments on her classmates’ writing. I had been silently admiring her self-possession: her refusal to hurry, her confidence that everyone else would be patient enough to allow her to speak her mind in the way that felt comfortable to her. That this student, of all people, wanted to learn how to speed up was a little bit crushing.
I suggested she embrace her natural pace—to see it as a strength, rather than a weakness. The problem wasn’t the speed she was reading; it was her expectation that she ought to be doing it differently. Spend a week tracking how much time you spend reading for class, I told her; that way you’ll know how long it will take in the future and you’ll be able to plan around it.
This was exactly the reassurance my student needed. Now I’m trying to give it to myself. The problem isn’t the amount of time I have to spend in limbo; it’s my perception that I should always be working towards a goal.
How do you manage your own expectations around goal-setting and time? Let me know in the comments.
What I’m reading
Sometimes you read a book and wonder where the author has been all your life. This was how I felt after putting down Catherine Chidgey’s Pet, a super-smart, engrossing, unnerving intellectual thriller. As I wrote in the New York Times Book Review, this book deserves to join We Have Always Lived in the Castle and My Brilliant Friend in “the small but potent canon of contemporary novels about unusual girls reckoning with themselves and the world around them.” I can’t wait to read everything else Chidgey has written.
As ever,
Ruth
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
No offense to Burkeman! I know people love this book. It just wasn’t the right time for me.
I've been working on a biography of Mary Todd, and American woman who left the US in 1964 at the age of 23 and spent her life in Cuba, becoming the island's foremost English translator. A lot of research on Cuba, and on Mary, has gone into every chapter, and I often feel that the project is taking too long. While curiosity about Mary's life under the changing difficulties of Cuban socialism drove me forward until recently, perhaps because I now know a lot, even curiosity hasn't always been enough. So I've told myself that I will finish by spring 2024. But how much do I have to do each day to meet that goal? And do I do enough? Although the answers to those two questions are unknowable, I suppose that I'm lucky that my questions are balanced by a sense on most days that I'm doing what I can. I take a walk or do yoga on most days to keep my body and soul open, which I believe is connected to what and how I write. Recently I took out time to rewrite a couple of early chapters. The work offers its own ever-evolving challenges and demands, and I can only be attentive to them, and to try to solve what needs to be solved.
The wise advice you offered your student is exactly the kind of life changing advice my 7th grade language arts teacher gave me. I’d been the slowest reader in the class, the last student to raise her hand after completing a silent reading assignment. My teacher saw the look of horror on my face when I realized everyone else had finished long before me. She bent down and whispered something to the effect of, “Good for you. Keep savoring every single word.” I went on to become a journalist and biographer, immersing myself deeply into the research, the stories, and the subjects.
After college, before I became a journalist, I worked at a soul-sucking advertising agency. It was there that I, too, felt that everyone read faster than me. I asked the HR department if they’d subsidize a speed reading course if I could find one. I didn’t, but they wouldn’t have paid the tab anyway. I wasn’t cut from the same cloth as my corporate minded peers, and I struggled for years in that environment.
Today, I’m a memoir coach and lead Write to Heal workshops designed to slow down and process life.
I’m doing what I was meant to do. It just took me awhile to find my footing. I’m so happy I did.
And I never forgot the words my teacher said about savoring every word.