Future Logic

Possibly the most common complaint writers have – and I mean any writers, personal, amateur, professional, bestselling, famous, obscure – is that they don’t have enough time to write. At a presentation a few years back, that was the first thing someone asked: “How do you make time to write?”

I looked around and said, “Do the rest of you have this problem?”

Well over half the audience raised their hands.  “OK, then what are you doing here? You just spent an hour and a half, plus driving time, not writing. You managed to make time to come hear me talk, and I’m glad you did, but if you are really so desperate for writing time, why didn’t you stay home and write for two hours?”

I went on for a while about how nobody gets more than 24 hours in a day, and I don’t have a magic time-generator in my closet; I simply choose to spend some of those hours writing instead of doing something else. And all that is true. But there’s another side to the no-time-to-write problem, and that’s how we think about the future.

For an awful lot of people, the future is emotionally either just like the present, or else completely unconnected with it. When I am sitting in my living room trying to knit with a cat on my lap, and I think “I am too comfortable to move; I will write tomorrow,” it feels to me as if it is exactly the same as thinking “I will write later today.” By this logic, tomorrow is just an extension of today, so putting my writing session off until tomorrow is no different from putting it off for another fifteen minutes or an hour.

Except that tomorrow isn’t just a straightforward extension of today. If I put my writing session off until tomorrow, I will either have to do two writing sessions in one day (or three, if I’m on a twice-a-day schedule), or I will be one session behind. This isn’t so bad when it’s just one make-up session, but if I skip two or three days in a row, I start running out of hours. (This logic works even less well when applied to exercise; you really can’t miss three or four days of exercise and then spend four hours at the gym and have it work.)

At least as important as the time limitation is the fact that if I put off today’s session until tomorrow, I will have gone an entire day without writing. I know from experience that I don’t write as many good words in two same-day sessions as I do when I’ve slept in between. Frequently, I don’t write as many total words, by quite a margin. And that adds up fast; if I write 500 words per day normally, and I skip a session and “catch up” the next day, I usually get a total for the day of 750-800 words, sometimes less. That’s 200 or more fewer words; do it five times and I’m two full days behind in spite of having just as many writing sessions.

None of that factors into the future logic that my brain is trying to con me into accepting when I’m sitting around with my cat trying to justify not writing today.

The other part of future logic that catches me is the fact that while tomorrow “feels” just like today, six months from now “feels” like never-never land. It is really easy to say “Sure, I’ll teach a six-week class” or “Of course I can go to that convention” when it’s six months or more in the future – the calendar is blank out there, so it looks as if I have plenty of time.

It’s not just a matter of forgetting to factor in the weeks of prep time for a class or the time it takes to get ready to leave on a trip and catch up after. It’s ignoring the fact that by the time next February gets here, I will be just as crazy-busy as I am now. My life is not going to magically set itself in order in the next six months, and the stuff that has gotten done will, by then, have been replaced by new, equally crazy-busy stuff. The copy-edit or the page proofs will arrive the day before I leave on the trip (or worse, the day after) with a one-week review deadline. The pipes in the laundry room will break, or the cat will need emergency vet visits and treatment, or I’ll break a tooth on that new rock candy stuff at the State Fair and have unexpected dentist visits and bills.

None of that automatically comes up when I’m making the decision to accept an appearance or go on vacation. I have to look at that lovely, empty calendar and consciously remind myself that it isn’t anything like as empty as it looks, just as I have to remind myself that two three-hour writing sessions tomorrow is not the same as one three-hour session today and one tomorrow.

It isn’t easy to remember to do this kind of deliberate thinking, and I don’t always manage to do it or to follow my real logic and experience instead of my fairy-tale future logic. But my life and my writing work a whole lot better when I manage.