Time by Ann Haywood Leal
Many of my writer and creative-type friends have just
drifted into their REM states when I get up in the morning. The sun hasn’t even opened one eye, but
I stumble down the stairs to feed my cats and open my laptop.
It’s for a pretty simple reason, really. Time.
I’ve been doing this for several years now. I guess I’m trying to stomp on the
popular refrain of busy people: There are only 24 hours in each day. Here’s my trick. Getting up before everyone except my
cats adds minutes and hours to my day.
No, I don’t have a plutonium-filled DeLorean in my garage
(unfortunately!), but I am adding minutes and hours to my writing day.
It’s the way I have to do it. I teach first grade, and there’s something I learned forever ago from my mom who
taught six and seven-year-olds before me:
they take more energy than you thought existed in your mind and
body. It’s a wonderful, satisfying
type of exhaustion, but it leaves very little for the end of my day.
But if I didn’t carve out that writing time, I’d be a
different kind of exhausted – the cranky, shuffle-around-mumbling kind.
And it’s true, unless you are meeting Dr. Emmett Brown and
Marty McFly in the parking lot of the Twin Pines Mall, you’re going to have to
give up something to create your own writing minutes and hours. It might be sleep or a kind-of-favorite
TV show. It could be your surfing
time (and I don’t mean on the beaches of sunny California).
It might be a little uncomfortable at first, like a little
pinch or a scrape-your-knee-and-need-your-mother-to-blow-on-it way, but you can
push through it. You should push through it.
Because when you do, you are left with a book . . . or a
poem . . . or a song. And that’s worth every bit of it.
That early morning writing time is STILL my best time, even though I'm a full time writer. There's something about the rest of the world being asleep........
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