An Alternate 1985: The Neverending Quest for More Time

by Salvatore Pane

I now realize how much of a gift my time in grad school was. I had so much time to write, so much time to read. And I’d like to think I made the most out of my three years, but who can be sure, right? By the final year, I was writing every single day and had managed that feat on and off for much of the first two years, but that certainly isn’t the case now.

So many of us writers are led to academia after graduation, but holy fuck is it a time drain. I’m teaching a 3/3 load and, Christ, am I grateful for that opportunity, but that coupled with a kind of hyper mega doom cold has drained my writing time down to nil. I’m pretty much healthy now and have been writing maybe 4 or 5 days a week which depresses me greatly. I’ve had to go back to what I did my first year of grad school and come up with a writing schedule. During the end of my time in the Pitt MFA program, I simply made the time, would wake up at 8 or 9 and write for 3 hours. Now that I teach at 9am, I no longer have that luxury.

Another problem with the writing every day rule: I’m no longer working on a novel. I found it easiest to write every day when I had a consistent world and voice to return to. It was so easy for me to fall into the voice I used for The Collected Works of the Digital Narcissist, because it was so close to my own natural writing voice. Within a few weeks of writing I fully understood that world, and what a comfort it was to inhabit it for a few hours every day for well over a year. The act of writing itself was a joy. It almost always is, but I felt a special kind of happiness working on that project.

With short stories, I just don’t have that level of comfort. You’re always coming up with new worlds, new characters, new voices. It’s such a drain. And I wish that I had the time to start a new novel now, but I really do believe you have to sit between these bigger projects and give yourself some time to replenish the well. I moved right from a very awful novel–the aforementioned ABORTION if you’ve read this blog for any length of time–into Digital Narcissist, because it took me 300 pages to find one interesting character and plot in that first book. I amputated that and started again. Otherwise, I would have probably waited.

I talk about this with my students a lot in workshop. As writers, some of us are sprinters and some of us are marathon runners. I don’t think my style or sensibilities are necessarily suited towards writing the short story in any long term sense. Have you ever felt this way? Have you ever been writing a short story or novel and found yourself wishing you were writing the other form?