Endless free time isn't the creative boon you think it is
Limited availability + a more structured schedule = a stronger urge to write (in my experience).
I have a mundane confession to make: I’ve taken a part-time job at a spa.
When I share this with people, I feel the urge to explain myself: I still consider myself a “full-time freelancer” because it’s my freelancing that pays my bills and allows me to buy stupid things, like $16 appetizers and skincare products that, to my dismay, don’t actually solve all my problems overnight. It is a massive privilege—and, in today’s suffering media landscape, one I constantly fear will vanish—to say that I only spend about 15 hours per week on at-home freelance work, leaving me with oodles of free time. And while I exercise daily and read ravenously and spend a good deal of time with friends, too much free time can be emotionally dangerous, especially when you are going through some shit and your brain’s favorite hobby is to wonder what’s wrong with you.
It’s for this reason that I applied a couple months ago for a receptionist role at a resort spa and “athletic club” that I once frequented entirely for its pool. Now, two nights a week, I schedule people’s massages, fold towels into neat little squares, and say “Welcome in!” approximately a thousand times. When I’m not doing those things, I’m being paid just above minimum wage to read or study Spanish or work on my Postcard Prompts, which are all things I’d (hopefully) be doing at home for free. It’s kind of the perfect gig.
After a couple of weeks at the spa, I noticed something strange beginning to occur: I felt more of an urge to write. Writing had been obscenely difficult for several months, thanks to severe depression and familial turbulence, and while I’d wanted to want to write, the drive just wasn’t strong enough to mark the page. Now, I was suddenly coming up with ideas and phrases while I did my little spa chores, and I’d find myself jogging back to my desk, sneakers squeaking against the shiny floor, to jot down whatever I was thinking before I could forget.
This confused me. For a long time, I’d felt a pitiful level of insecurity over how little I wrote despite having such abundant time to do so. I’m going to look back on this part of my life someday and know I wasted it, I’d worry. Only a fool—or a person who didn’t know how good they had it—would squander such an outstanding opportunity to write the next great American novel. But squander I did, self-consciously watching The Pitt and playing video games instead.
Fast-forward a few months, and I had 16 fewer hours to spend writing each week, yet I was (and still am) writing more. What’s up with that?
Every so often, a clip from an interview with a famous author goes around that details the writer’s frantic writing schedule from before they were popular:
“Writing before dawn began as a necessity—I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, ‘Mama.’”
- Toni Morrison (The Paris Review, 1993)
As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children's nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven.
- The intro to an interview with Alice Munro in The Atlantic (2001)
“I would wake up at 5:00, and I’d be at my office by 5:30. That was the only quiet time of the day. Because Renee and I were having babies…I was in the legislature in Mississippi…From 5:00 until 8:30, or 9:00, that was the only quiet time of the day. And I’d go to the office and make some strong coffee and sit down and start writing.”
-John Grisham (PBS, 2008)
I always assumed these kinds of quotes were popular for two reasons: 1) they evoked the romantic cliche of a writer frantically scribbling away at every available moment, and 2) they made the average writer (myself included, for a time) feel better about being unable to devote a majority of their day to writing.
While these factors probably do play a role in our collective obsession with hearing how famous writers got their start, I now wonder if these snippets hold a bit of truth about the nature of creativity and the artistic drive. Would Morrison and Munro have become such a prolific writers if they’d been childfree or had abundant access to childcare? Would Grisham have produced so many thrillers if he hadn’t had the pressure of a full-time job and a family?
Maybe they would! (I don’t have a time machine to find out.) My point is that it’s too easy to tell yourself you’ll write later when you know for certain that you will have time to do so this evening, and tomorrow, and the next day, and so on. Having a few restrictions on that free time can help.
This isn’t to say that the crushing weight of capitalism, which insists that we (over)work to survive and Do It All outside of work (have children, keep our homes clean, hang out with our friends, exercise regularly, cook nutritious meals, travel, maintain hobbies, spend time with family, have a shiny social media presence, and chase some overarching dream that, when achieved, will make it all worth it), is something we should be grateful for. It is not lost on me that my little spa gig, which still puts me at under 40 hours of work per week, is one I took basically for fun (and for the sweet discounts) and that if I lost it tomorrow, I’d be fine.
But for people like me, who have a strong work ethic but, um, flexible discipline, the external pressure of having places to be at specific times—even if those “places” are in a content management system or on Zoom—can offer a decent framework upon which to hang a more robust writing habit.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. When I asked folks on Substack whether they’d ever found themselves with more robust writing habits after committing to a tighter schedule, Destiny Henderson-Hudgins said: “I swear I only got into the rhythm of my Substack once I had a full time job and less free time.” bathtubphonecall had a similar sentiment: “I actually bring a pocket sized journal around with me at work now so I can jot ideas down quickly when I think of them. Most of my essays and short stories are written on my lunch breaks or in the car immediately after work.”
I still think it’d be beautiful and righteous for creative people to be universally comfortable enough in their financial lives to make art via their own ideal routines. I believe in the importance of art grants, fellowships, and even UBI models that offer people the funds necessary to abandon their “survival jobs” in favor of more creative time. I still hope that I continue to make the part of my living that matters through freelance work, affording me the freedom to choose how I spend my time.
In the meantime, though, it’s a comfort to know that even work that doesn’t “fulfill” me in a personal or creative sense can have positive downstream effects on the things that do. Here I am, folding towels mid-shift (a task that dishes out the perfect dose of boredom) and when a clever sentence pops into my head, I’ll take a moment to write it down because I know it may not come to me again. As soon as I get a few minutes of free time, I’ll turn that sentence into a paragraph or two, conscious of how precious those minutes are.
Knowing I have limited time “gets my butt in the chair,” which is often the toughest part of writing consistently. And as the quote attributed to seemingly every famous author goes: Starting is the hardest part.
What’s been inspiring me lately:
✰ Ashley Nelson Levy’s novel, Immediate Family.1 I looove a 2nd-person POV, and the protagonist’s complex relationship with her Thai adoptive brother (and, by extension, how her white biological family missed the mark) made for a uniquely interesting read, even if I found the ending a little dissatisfying.
✰ Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. I think people doing the right thing at great personal risk is very hot, and also I think it’s fun to ponder the societal consequences of discovering for certain that aliens exist. Very cool movie!
✰ This article from Kali Holloway at The Nation: “Americans Are Reaching a Financial Breaking Point”
✰ Learning that an “unprecedented surge” in local backlash has halted 75 planned US data center projects in just 3 months.
As always, if you purchase a book through my Bookshop.org affiliate link, I will earn a very small commission at no extra cost to you!
I totally agree that time constraint can help reduce procrastination or at least help us hone in on just generating/making “good enough”.
I also know that there’s a whole world of invisible artists with disabilities and poor workers etc for whom this may not be viable or simple.
Sometimes we need lots of rest and retreat. There’s so many variables, many of which are designed oppressions.
So its good to have options, especially mindset options for various situations.
Im directing my friends one woman show currently and they have to create a deadline where an audience shows up for them to get the energy to rearrange their life to make-the-thing.
Me, im lucky if i can create the time and artistic distance to make anything of my own thats not for survival demands, so i have a ton of devising techniques that take less than 5 minutes and dont require much in terms of supplies.