Writing Intensives
When I’m embarking on a novel, I set a daily word count, and write seven days a week until the draft is finished: generally 1000 words.
When I was younger, I commonly did 3000, but 1000 knocks me out these days. Rarely, I get the word count done in the morning, but far more frequently, I’m writing till ten at night, or till 2 a.m. It’s a sit-there-until-I’m-done enterprise Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
It makes for crappy everything else—friendships, relationships, parenting, movie-going, whatever.
But since I now live alone, I am free to do intensives the way I would once have done them via winter housesitting, or by going to a retreat like Banff. Or for longer and harder.
A couple of weeks ago, I finished up an intensive from February of 2014 that ended up lasting 17 months.
That was crazy—even I recognize that--and I felt the burden of it.
On the other hand, absorbed as I was, I didn’t have to clean my place or do my laundry or make my bed. I didn’t have to get dressed. I didn’t have to make the garden presentable. No one cared what I ate or when I went to bed or got up.
I was free to write my fingers into nubs.
When I traveled, as I had to do for reading tours, I kept up my punishing schedule. Even the day I attended the Governor General’s awards in Ottawa after flying in from NY, I got my 1000 words in. Even the day I took 5 ferries to get back to Vancouver from a reading on Hornby Island, via Saltspring, I did my words.
During most of this lengthy intensive, I was sick. I began the intensive accidentally because, due to disability, I had become a shut-in, and, really, what else was there to do except write? I was traveling a lot in 2014. I spent 5 weeks in Paris shut-in. I spent a month in Toronto and another month in Montreal shut-in. I was shut-in when I was home in Vancouver.
So I wrote.
I got sicker. Eventually, it was time to re-write ‘The Lost Boy” and I was acutely ill. The words from in hospitals, written while my heart flew out of my chest, were indistinguishable from text I might have written in my semblance of normal.
I could argue that having my kids grown, my marriage shattered, leaves me free to be unloved, and to an extent, I’d be correct. Love is a many-tendriled rope that long knotted me, hard, to the world. Now I enjoy solitude and few demands. You know how many older women say they’re too set in their ways now to ever be with another partner? I suspect that might describe me now, too. I can’t imagine knocking off work because it’s dinner time, or someone’s wanting to spend the evening together.
