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Unstructured TimeSeptember 16, 2005 I cleared four days -- yesterday afternoon through Monday morning -- so I could work on the book review that's due on Monday, of Octavia Butler's forthcoming novel, Fledgling, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, which was published to a well-orchestrated big splash this past spring. I'm not an especially fast writer, and reviews come slowest of all, but the deadline shouldn't be difficult. (Good thing: the original deadline was last Monday, and having imposed on the editor's kindness to wangle an extension, I am not going to screw up.) So far I've finished reading The Historian, an interminable slog that I would have dropped around page 100 if I hadn't already decided that it would make an interesting foil for Fledgling. (Two more different takes on vampires can hardly be imagined.) I'm nearly halfway through rereading Butler's Parable of the Sower, whose protagonist-narrator took up residence in my head while I was reading the new novel. I'd forgotten how good it was, and yes, the similarities between Fledgling's Shori and Sower's Lauren are worth exploring. I'll finish Sower tonight, reread and make notes on Fledgling tomorrow, have Sunday and Monday morning to write -- and still be able to go out to dinner tomorrow night. No sweat. Make that "no problem." Sweatless writing is not in my repertoire, not when a deadline is pending. What I keep forgetting is how unstructured time freaks me out. Some writers can take a week or two or a month or, muses forbid, a year off to write, but not me. As gases expand to fill whatever space is available to them, so my writing expands to fill however many hours and days and weeks are available to it. The words spread out like so many racing molecules; they don't cohere, and nothing takes shape. Deadlines provide limits: I'm good at deadlines -- I can even acknowledge in advance that a deadline isn't doable and negotiate a new one. No editor was waiting for my first novel: that's why it took me more than 25 years to finish one. One thing I learned along the way was that I got more writing done when I was working a paid job four or five hours a day then I did when I was "taking time off to write." Structure is good. Without the structure of the glass, my Sam Adams would be a big puddle on my desk and I'd be lapping up pencil shavings, spilled wax, breadcrumbs, and dirt along with the beer. Without the structure of full-time editing and part-time horsekeeping, I'd piss most of the day away messing around on e-mail lists and playing computer solitaires. If horsekeeping weren't eating up so much of my time and money, I'd probably be traipsing around the country to science fiction conventions. As a freelancer, I have to structure my own days. Plenty of people tell me, "I don't know how you do it," and over the years I have known plenty of people who've tried freelancing and given it up because they didn't have the "discipline." That word "discipline," or "self-discipline," comes up a lot. I don't think of myself as having much of it. For 20 years, more or less, depending on how you count, I ate compulsively. I couldn't start a quart of ice cream without finishing it, or a box of cookies, or even a loaf of bread. Discipline? Forget it. Once the stone started rolling downhill, I couldn't stop it. Once I thought about the ice cream in the freezer, it was as good as eaten. The trick, I eventually came to understand, through much trial and error and collision with many brick walls, is to not let it start rolling. If my life was rightly structured, I didn't think about the ice cream. And . . . If my life was rightly structured, I could write. To most people I know, my life probably doesn't look rightly structured. It probably looks more like a Rube Goldberg disaster careening downhill. Don't worry: If I were my best friend, I'd be thinking exactly the same thing: Are you fucking crazy?? Maybe saying it out loud; maybe not. Whatever -- unstructured time is a black hole, a bottomless pit. I don't allow myself much of it, and there has to be a deadline on the other end.
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