Remembering to create time and space to write
I need and want writing to be the baseline beat of my daily, weekly life so why do I let a habit that I love, and that nourishes me slip so easily...
Greetings dear reader,
How are you this first Sunday of March 2025? In this corner of Yorkshire the whispers of Spring are getting louder, my sunglasses have had their first outing of the year and some have even been brave enough to do away with a coat. That said, the man I saw striding through town this afternoon wearing a black vest, Bermuda shorts and a straw sun hat was maybe the bravest - and coldest - of all.
‘How we spend our days is….how we spend our lives’
I guess there is one quote that’s lurked in my mind these past few weeks. It might be one you’ve come across, I might even have shared it before. It’s by the American writer Annie Dillard and it goes like this.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
It popped into my mind during Writers Hour, you might remember me mentioning Writers Hour with
before, you might be a Writers Hour writer already.
These free fifty-ish minute writing sessions on Zoom - alone but together - have kept me writing for years now. I realised though that I'd let this habit, a nourishing habit at that, slide. Rejoining these sessions has reminded me how important it is to have this space and time marked out in the calendar to not only write, but to write in the company of others, 330+ people and counting one morning alone last week.
Hello, hello, hello!
I can’t help but smile at the cacophony of hellos as people wander into the Zoom room, and the instant silence when the hosts put us on mute. I love seeing the chat fill with people saying hello, where they are in the world, what the weather is like and what they’re going to work on during the session.
That first session back I remembered how good it felt using this time for free writing (some call it journalling, others Morning Pages). Those empty the head onto a page writing sessions that leave me feeling lighter, creating space for other words and thoughts to emerge. Or simply allowing me to go about the day feeling less burdened by the thoughts running in a never ending circle.
It’s the kind of writing I love but for some reason fall out the habit of doing, especially if I don’t have something like Writers Hour to give me the nudge to pick up the pencil.
It was during one of these writing sessions that I remembered the Annie Dillard quote, and how these regular drops of writing give me a baseline to my day, my week alongside the HiT sessions, the shifts on the shop floor at Oliver Bonas and walks with Bella on the moor. A baseline that I also slot my freelance client writing into.
I don’t know what you’d call the rhythm this baseline creates, but I do know that as I tip toe out of a few weeks of being in a fatigue funk, I'm putting things in my diary that, as per Annie's quote, bring reason and order, as well as peace to my life
Baseline, verse and chorus
This is the baseline that I can layer a line of verses over - trips out to Salts Mill, to Leeds and outings with friends (my own version of Julia Cameron’s artist’s dates if you follow The Artist’s Way) before the chorus comes in with its holidays and longer breaks. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it works in my head.
I think one of the reasons I’ve been struggling to find a rhythm this year is because I was racing ahead to the verse and chorus without having put the baseline down.
Reading, reading and more reading
Last year I read a lot of books, I have a list on my phone, but I didn’t feel like I engaged with, or really loved books in the way I have done before. More books than usual were left unread, and I’m not one for abandoning a book.
This year feels different though. Deleting apps from my phone, swapping that dead time spent scrolling for pages in hand is making a difference and I’m switching between books as I would flicking through the TV channels of an evening. Back to Annie again and being more deliberate in not only how I spend my time, but how I want to be, how I want to feel in these minutes and hours too.
There’s Clare Chamber’s Shy Creatures that I listen to when I’m walking to work or walking laps of the tarn with the dog.
Full disclosure though, I wasn’t paying attention when I downloaded Shy Creatures, I saw the name Clare, thought I was downloading something by ‘Small things like these’ author, the brilliant Claire Keegan, only to realise I’d downloaded a book by the other author called Clare I like who wrote a book with the word ‘small’ in it. Clare ‘Small Pleasures’ Chambers.
What I think Clare Chambers is so good at is writing tightly observational novels set in the 1950s and 1960s with women front and centre, quietly questioning their place in the world and their relationships with the men around them. There’s a very distinctive style to her books, the characters and stories that I like. It reminds me of Sally Vickers in some ways and I’m enjoying listening to Shy Creatures.
At night though I’m reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and I love it. I love the way it makes me feel. I love how light it is in my hands, I love the cover and I love how it tackles big themes in such a gentle, human way. A book to savour and come back to.
I don’t read it during the day though. Daytime reading, as in the books I carry around the house with me or have in my bag when out and about tend to be meatier, layered stories I get can my teeth into, and right now Elif Shafak’s Three Daughters of Eve fits that bill. I’m enjoying the unfolding of Peri’s story from her childhood in Istanbul, student days at Oxford, and back in Istanbul as a wife and mother where we first meet her.
That said, a friend placing Sophie van Lleweyn’s Bottled Goods into my hands partway through last week has thrown all of that up in the air. She knew I’d love it, and I do. It’s a novella-in-flash according to the blurb on the back. The writing is beautiful, each one of the short chapter stories perfect in their own right and strung together they make for a beautiful short read.
Sidenote: These are the people I want to surround myself with. Friends who not only recommend books but come and place them in your hands.
I’ve also laid my hands on a copy of Nature’s Calendar as recommended by
in her seasonal writing workshop. I don’t need a lot of encouragement to slow down, but I’ve been struggling with this four seasons in a year thing for a while, and to have the year broken down into 72 micro seasons so beautifully illustrated and explained is a joy.As of today, Sunday 2nd March we are in ‘Frogspawn Wobbles’ season until 5th March when we move into ‘Woodpeckers Drumming’. Brilliant.
And finally this Sunday evening I’ll leave you with these words from poet David Whyte. These ‘Words of Wisdom’ were shared at the beginning of Writers Hour this week and they are beautiful.
Routine that carries the timeless and the exploratory, can become the central foundation of keeping a relationship alive, of writing a book, raising a family, building a house.
We make a miracle out of simply turning up, at the same time to do the same good work, watching that work mature, slowly, with our daily visitations, into something we could not fully imagine, before we gave ourselves over to that daily, dedicated, repeated, miraculous act of appearance and disappearance at the waiting desk or at our well-loved familiar workbench.
David Whyte, Consolations II
Wishing you a calm and peaceful week ahead, thank you as ever for being here.
Harriet
PS I’ve written this between the kitchen and living room after a shift at work so please forgive any typos and mistakes. I’m sure I’ll spot them as soon as I send this out!
If you want to know more about Gently Does It, what it is and what makes me tick, dive into the Welcome Post that I’ve pinned to my Substack home page. This along with my About page will give you a feel for what I write, why and how you can join in the conversation.
Loved this gentle meander around the idea of routine, and those poems, Harriet! It’s been feast or famine re routines for me these past few years but currently trying a list of daily ‘essentials’ before I tackle any ‘additionalities’. This seems to be working, but like you, my regular writing practice has fallen off that list of essentials - or additionalities! - because I got stuck with my novel revision process and so everything writing-related stopped with it! It’s so easy to fall out of it but I’m going to make sure to include it in my daily ‘essentials’ now :)
This the second David Whyte quote I’ve read on Substack in the last two days and now I’ve got to go look for more.
Why we don’t do more of the very thing that nurtures and sustains us is the question, isn’t it? Working on that (always) myself. I think putting ourselves in the way of it (i.e. routines, dedicated spaces) and out of the way of other convenient distractions is key, along with getting clear on why we want to do the thing.