When you are making time to write (or bird-watch, or build rockets, or take photographs, or reupholster your sofa), you do not always have to hack time out of the sidewalk and then take off running before your other duties-and-obligations catch up to you and rip your new-found treasure out of your hands.
SOMETIMES, you are at work. Now, you like work. You are “blessed with work,” to quote a wise character in a rather good movie. Your job is awesome and you wouldn’t trade it for another unless the pay was a whole lot better. Your job is at a Cider Mill, where you make doughnuts, craft pies, cookies, cupcakes, and muffins, and tend bar. Not, like, an actual alcoholic bar, but a cider bar, where you smilingly give customers free cider tastings, and then mix up whatever it is they want to purchase before you smilingly lead them over to the cash register and even more smilingly take their money.
SOMETIMES, though, there is no one in the Cider Mill. No one to smile at. No one to make baked goods for. No one to follow around nonchalantly to make sure she’s not shoplifting, even. So, like the good employee you are, you make yourself useful and start cleaning. When all else fails, there is always cleaning to be done.
HOWEVER!
Cleaning is a lot more fun when you have something to think about while you sweep/dust/scrub toilets/whatever. So, being a writer (sorry, this will probably only apply to writers, as you cannot do this if you are a birdwatcher, rocket-builder, photograph-taker, or sofa-reupholsterer), you start to hash out your next scene while you work. Which basically means you talk to yourself incessantly while you work.
Characters do battle in various places with various different creatures, declare undying hatred for each other, get lost/separated/injured/etc, change their minds and declare undying love for each other, argue constantly, and so on and so forth, all while you are maneuvering a large push-broom up and down the aisles or washing a mountain of dishes, or wiping down the long bar-counter with a white washrag. You might not be putting pen to page, but you are certainly calling words out of the void and wrestling them into place. You are storytelling, and making your eventual writing-session much, MUCH easier. At the end of the day, when you get home from work and sit down with your black notebook and your orange pencil, you’ve already done the hard stuff. Now, all you have to do is transfer your scenes out of your head and onto the paper.
I am not suggesting this become a regular thing. First of all, because it means that no one ever comes into your store, and second of all, if you spend too much time talking to yourself, your employers are going to walk in on you one day and think you’ve lost your mind. But, it is a way to use the time you’ve been given to maximum effect.
And as writers trying to make our way through an angry horde of things calling for our attention, we need to take all such chances as they come.
SO, I raise my glass (of cider) to you, and wish you good fortune as you do your best to get that sofa reupholstered. I mean – that story written.
Cheers,
elf
WritingSliver 