Writing Week

It’s Friday morning. That means I am where I always am on Friday mornings – at Pascal’s, in the little wine alcove off the main room, at a café table with slate under my feet.

This is the beginning of my writing week.

A few years ago, when I started writing seriously, I struggled with how to figure out if I was writing enough. I didn’t know how to build a schedule that made sense for me. I was obsessed with reading about writers’ schedules and daily word counts. If I remember correctly, Anne Lamott says 600 words or about two pages a day, Carolyn See says no less than a thousand words a day every day for the rest of your life (that scared me). Others (John Updike, Maya Angelou, Julia Alvarez) were fans of the keep-your-butt-in-the-chair-for-a-set-time-every-day school of thought.

I played around with all of these, but with my crazy work schedule and trying to maintain some normalcy with my family (imagine: “No, Jess, I can’t come see your project at school because it’s Tuesday and you know that I write on Tuesday nights), none made sense.

After a while I came up with my own take on all of this – a weekly word count of 3,500 (very carefully negotiated with myself – 5 days at 700 words a day). At first, like all good lawyers, I started my writing week on Monday morning. But that soon left me in a sweaty panic because Thursday morning would come around and I would have not written anything for the week. Then I joined a writing group that met on Thursday nights. That meant that at least Wednesday would be productive. But the added benefit was that I woke up on Fridays energized and ready to go, ready to implement the changes and ideas I’d gotten the night before.

So I started going out for breakfast on Friday before I went to the office – and realized that was the true start of my writing week. I’d get a few pages done and then if I was able to leave the office early on Friday, do more when I got home. My momentum carried me through the weekend, getting me up early on Saturday when my husband gets up before dawn to go cycling. Then it didn’t matter if I had a dry spell on Monday and Tuesday.

I don’t count words anymore but I did set up a nifty writing schedule on Google calendar to try to get me to a finished first draft of my book by April 1.

Pascal is the perfect place for writing. There’s a low buzz of conversation, the hiss of the coffee machine and weird French pop playing in the background. People come and go but no one raises an eyebrow at me in my little corner. A sign says there’s wi fi but I don’t need the distraction. I think they’d let me sit here all day – my morning cappuccino and croissant eventually converting into a rotisserie chicken with Dijon sandwich and maybe a mid-afternoon macaron. But I’ve never gotten that far. I always get done with everything I have to give and am back out in the parking lot well before noon. Maybe a little writer’s block at Pascal would be okay one day.