Labor or Leisure?

You can never tell when a writer is working

What is work to a writer?  This is not a question we’d ask if we were contemplating the daily efforts of a plumber or a sales clerk, a barista or a lawyer, a carpenter, a nurse, or a bus driver.  That work is visible and self-evident.  It happens in front of us, straightforward, understandable. The plumber unclogs a drain.  The clerk rings up a sale.  The barista pulls a shot.

But what of the writer?

Thumb tacked to a shelf above my computer, in my writing room, is a file card on which I have scrawled a quote from Wallace Stevens.  Stevens was a successful New York lawyer and a big-time insurance company executive before he began the much harder work of becoming a Pulitzer prize-winning poet.

Here’s the line:

“It is not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out the window.”

Writing is thinking, or thinking made manifest; thoughts ordered, set down, crafted, honed and polished.  So what Stevens is really saying, or what he is saying to me, every day, many times a day, when I look up at this quote is:  It is not easy to tell when a writer is working. Whew. That’s a relief.  Because if you were here right now watching me work, this is what you’d see:

Me looking out the window.

After a long minute that stretches into several, I get up and refill my water bottle.  Then, perched on the inflatable ball I sit on rather than an office chair, I bounce up and down.  I look out the window.  Bounce.  Drink water.  Look.

Then, finally:  I type words on my keyboard that appear on the screen.  I delete. I type.  I delete.  I type.  You can hear the click click of fingers on keys. You can see that I’m doing something, so that means I’m doing something.  This is the real work of the writer, right?

Wrong.  The real work is the looking out the window.  That’s when I think, when ideas come (or not), when structure forms (or crumbles), when connections happen (or don’t).  It may look as if I’m doing nothing – daydreaming, goldbricking, lollygagging –but most of the time spent gazing out over the weedy meadow I can see from my office window, I’ve got quite a few neurons firing.  Most of the time, I’m on the clock.

But it’s not just the line between writing and reverie that is blurry when you’re in the word biz.  It is also the line between work and play, between labor and leisure.  A few mornings ago, I was swimming laps with a friend of mine, an historian working on a book.  After three-quarters of an hour of vigorous freestyle, we pulled ourselves out of the pool and sat on the edge, panting.  “I figured it out!” she said to me, pulling off her cap and grinning.  “I figured out how to make that transition work.”  While she was swimming, she was working.

That happens to me too.  Regularly. Sometime during those endless laps, after my mind quiets, after I stop worrying about my daughter’s grade in science, after I stop planning dinner, after I stop obsessing about what the chlorine is doing to my hair, ideas come to me, solutions to problems appear.  Some of my clearest thoughts, my sharpest insights come when I’m not trying – when I’m “playing.”

And what about all the hard work I am doing when it looks to others as if I’m just curled up with a good book?  Reading is a pleasure, a hobby, a form of entertainment, so I must be “at play.” But I am also at work.  I am immersing myself in language, hearing the sounds of words, swaying to the rhythm of sentences, learning how writers reveal characters, how they tell stories.

In the name of work, I have done many things others would consider play: going to the movies, taking a train ride from Los Angeles to Seattle, touring one of the finest botanical gardens in the country, spa-hopping across northern Tuscany.  I’ve flown in a vintage airplane.  I’ve watched a season of college basketball from a seat right behind the players’ bench.

But I have also done some actual, bona fide, sweaty labor in the service of my writing. For my book, “Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s,” I took a bottom-of-the-rung, minimum-wage job as an aide at an Alzheimer’s care facility.  There, for more than four months, I cared for a dozen people who could not care for themselves.  I showered them, brushed their teeth, toileted them, changed their diapers, hefted them from bed to wheelchair to couch.  I cut up their food, fed them, did their laundry.  It was a tough job.  And that was the easy part.

The hard part was the hours, days, weeks and months of searching for and finding the right words to tell their story, to make those experiences come alive.  The hard part was being still. The hard part was looking out the window.