I was a wallflower for most of college. Then came senior year and I was partying as hard as anyone on East Campus (the, ah, less quiet end). In a suspiciously similar pattern, I wrote quite a bit during the first three years, and not so much the last.
It wasn't so much the debauched revelries as lack of time — okay, fine, the revelries didn't help. But my dorm room had a window out to the street where some of my friends had to walk when they wanted to get back to their own dorms from main campus. Naturally they'd toss a rock at my window to see if I was up, and if I was (sometimes I woke because of said rock, but they were never picky), they'd stop in to chat or drag me out for beer, and the next thing I knew it was five in the morning and I needed to catch some shut-eye so I could attend a lecture in four hours. Of course there would be something happening that evening, a party or maybe dinner anywhere but in the dining halls, and maybe a date the next day, and remember that I was supposedly studying for a degree amidst all this?
I've had plans every day since Wednesday, and will continue to do so through not this coming weekend, but the next one. There was even stumbling home at five in the morning at one point. These are all things I really shouldn't be missing out on: a birthday celebration, a friend I haven't seen in over a year, an annual beer festival (okay, so maybe the days of debauchery aren't yet over), a symphony performance, a meditation retreat, and yes, a date...
Where is the writing time?
I've taken to carrying large purses with a notebook tucked inside them, and my favorite writing pen. At least that way I can dash off a sentence or even a line of dialogue if it occurs to me amidst the chaos of my schedule. But these jumbled fragments do not a story make. It's coalescing these into a rope of narrative that's the real work.
I suppose it's about priorities. At work, people will schedule blocks of time in their calendars in order to work on specific projects, so that no one can drag them into a meeting at that time. I need to schedule in writing time, and tell people that I have other plans when they want to do something with me then.
I can do it. After all, sometime in my third quarter, I learned to bury my head under my pillow and ignore the rocks plinking off my window.