Writing Time, Activist Time
For the past few weeks, activist time and writing time have been moving to two different clocks: the first a stopwatch frantically ticking backwards to an impending deadline, the second an old wooden wall clock that has come to a creaking halt. When I was growing up, my family had a grandfather clock in the hallway of our home; my father lovingly wound it every day with a special key so it would chime accurately on the hour. Recently, I have felt the ghost of the old clock glaring over my shoulder. I haven’t had time to wind it, let alone sit long enough to listen to the slow tick of the minute hand making its way round to the next hour.
Those of you who’ve been reading this newsletter regularly will know that I’ve been busy campaigning in local elections for the past few months, spending my evenings and weekends dashing from going doorstep to doorstep, canvassing, delivering leaflets. All the while I’ve been a sidekick to a group of people putting in even longer hours. The feeling of support, teamwork and community is what sustains us in moments like this. Years ago, when I interviewed Basque women who had been involved in radical nationalist politics in the 1960s and 1970s, a number recalled those times as some of the happiest in their lives: activist time is often community time, working closely with others on a common cause that brings not only companionship but a sense of purpose, something beyond the self.
But all this physical work and time spent strategising and running around with others can also make it hard to find time for writing – not only to carve out the minutes and hours and find the energy, but also to slow down enough to let the mind settle and wander, think in more creative and less strategic ways.
Even as I write these words, I feel a pernicious dichotomy creeping up: activism as fast time vs writing as slow time. This opposition is too simplistic. Lots of writing is frenzied – journalists frequently write to impossible deadlines, for example, preparing copy around and against the clock. Students and academics write to deadlines all the time. Deadlines are important: without them lots of work would never get completed, submitted or published. No one who writes regularly hasn’t had to speed up the pace under pressure. And there are lots of overlaps between activism and writing. I spend quite a bit of my activist time penning leaflets, statements, letters, agendas, minutes of meetings, and emails. Moreover, sustained activism requires moments of calm and reflection. Without these, political ideas become stale and rigid, and activists run the risk of burn-out (more on those topics in future posts).
But at the most basic level, these weeks of being run off my feet with activism have made me think about time in a more literal sense. Who has the time to write? Who has the energy? The space – both figurative and literal?
Almost a century ago, Virginia Woolf famously wrote that women writers need a room we can turn the key on and a small stipend in order to write. A feminist classic that addresses the significant challenges facing the female novelist, Woolf’s text is nevertheless limited in scope. Its literary references are English and European, and though she was conscious of the challenges facing working-class writers, Woolf envisioned writing as a largely solitary activity, reflecting a Western, bourgeois bias. The history of global feminism, in contrast, teaches us that writing – even when it bears a lone name – is always a collective activity.
The value of A Room of One’s Own was its attempt to politicise a question that remains relevant today. Whatever its form, writing requires time to think, debate – inside one’s head and/or with others – create, draft, edit. It also necessitates what today we would call “down time”.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
One hundred years after Woolf wrote those words, writers of all genders, including those who benefit from many of the privileges that, in Woolf’s day, were limited to men with money, continue to grapple with the problem of time. There is no end of advice out there for the writer in search of writing time: get up an hour early in the morning, write in short bits of time between other tasks, keep a notebook with you wherever you go, write at the same time in the same place everyday day….
I’ve found many of these tips helpful and I’ve shared some of them with other writers. But ultimately they are based on an assumption that it’s up to us as individuals to take time on, struggle with it and to force it onto our side. What isn’t addressed in this kind of advice is the wider issue: the problem of living in a society in which time, like all resources, is distributed grossly unevenly.
To acknowledge this inequality is to acknowledge that having decent time to write is a privilege. Yet if we’re to avoid the moralising that too often characterises debates about privilege, we might be better to take the focus off the individual and consider time as a collective responsibility. As writers, rather than – or, at least, in addition to – obsessing endlessly about how we can jealously guard our hard-won solo writing time, we might ask ourselves what we are doing in our day-to-day lives to make more time available for everyone who wants to write.
After all, any struggle for greater equality among people – access to housing and healthcare, taxation and income levels, to name a few – is ultimately a fight for a more just distribution of time for activities other than those aimed at meeting our basic needs.
As I come to the close of this short piece of writing, which has taken more time than I planned, I’m already re-imagining my activist time. Instead of a sneaky thief who steals away my precious personal writing time, I envision it as another tool we can use to spread time out and spread it around – helping to bring into being a world in which everyone who wants to write has the time.
Thank you for writing this. I read it with more attention today. I have felt similarly about writing time and teaching time. And I have often guarded my solo time to write while mum cooked, even as an adult. I love: "we might be better to take the focus off the individual and consider time as a collective responsibility. As writers, rather than – or, at least, in addition to – obsessing endlessly about how we can jealously guard our hard-won solo writing time, we might ask ourselves what we are doing in our day-to-day lives to make more time available for everyone who wants to write."
There are many helpful thoughts in this piece, not least those referencing Virginia Woolf’s requirements for a ‘room of one’s own’ and a regular stipend for writing – as women, we all know that one! But I also appreciate your description of the dichotomies between slow writing time and faster writing for activism. As the latter is something I've experienced plenty of burnout from, my usual approach to time managing diverse projects (including actual in-person activism, eg protests, as well as writing about it) is to compartmentalise or parcel out segments of time each day/week for my different writing or creative passion hats, hopefully allowing for a more equivalent scale. When it works, it is very fulfilling and satisfactory; but when it doesn't, it is simply frustrating! So I'm still working on it, but here's to our collective eventual growth as writers as we navigate these challenges.