My husband and I share childcare duties equally. Sam looks after our 21-month-old son in the morning from 9-12, then I take over in the afternoon after Jude’s nap. Until now, this meant that I was getting about five hours of work done a day. This, until now, was not enough.
So, even though I’m a night owl and feel I do my best work after everyone’s gone to bed and the night is young, I decided that I was going to become an early riser. I set my alarm for 6 a.m. and for a few days at least, I wrote undisturbed for two hours every morning before anyone, including the animals, was awake.
I was inspired, in part, by Anne Lamott’s father. “Every morning, no matter how late he had been up, my father rose at 5:30, went to his study, wrote for a couple of hours, made us all breakfast, read the paper with my mother, and then went back to work for the rest of the morning,” Lamott writes in her excellent book for writers, Bird by Bird. “Many years passed before I realized he did this by choice, for a living, and that he was not unemployed or mentally ill.”
But while Lamott’s father may have stuck to his routine for as long as he was capable, I, on the other hand, folded after about six days. And it took only about six more days of staying up until midnight playing catch up to realize how the lack of discipline was keeping me from achieving my writing goals.
We’ve all heard about the authors who make the time, no matter what, for their writing, whether that’s waking up at 5 in the morning or staying up well past midnight. And like most of you, I am amazed and inspired by these people who manage to get everything done, despite their kids, despite their full-time jobs, despite every obstacle that is thrown their way. They chip away for years and finally the novel emerges and it sells and it does well and all that effort was well worth the sacrifice.
In your life, and in mine, however, the reality looks a bit different. You wake up at 6 and after a lot of cursing, drag yourself out of bed, put on a whole big pot of black tea, and clutch it all the six steps to your office, where you collapse in a chair, drain the pot, make another one, and get ready to start work for the day. Two hours later, you’ve written and you’ve produced—yay!—but it’s utter utter crap. It’s the kind of thing a half-asleep night owl writes at six in the bloody morning. And after three days of this, you start wondering if there’s a point to it. And after six days, you give up, because no, no there’s no point to it. You’re producing crap and you’re at exactly the same point you were had you not been making this immense sacrifice because what you’re writing is unusable and unbearable. At least if you were sleeping, you’d be getting some rest.
So you give up and go about your life. Until, of course, the urge strikes again. To give it another go. To see if perhaps the next time might be different. Maybe you don’t have to tackle fiction first thing in the morning, maybe you can tackle something else.
Give it a go. Because I did. And what I learned was this: Our minds and our bodies need training. Because six days is nothing. Because if you have the will to push on after six days, despite the utter crap you’re producing, you start getting better. Your mind and your body start succumbing. After day twelve, you’re still producing crap, but it’s editable crap, and after day twenty, you’re on a roll. After a month, you’ve built yourself a routine and now you’re one of those annoying people who get up in the morning and write for two hours before anyone’s even gotten out of bed.
I’m well on my way to becoming those annoying people and writing a thousand words a day before my day has even started. What’s stopping you?