The Privilege of Time
In the Instagram era, the pop-culture image of a professional author has expanded from the recluse ensconced in their country home, or the urban starving artist, to include a person on a laptop, serenely pulling together their next book or article in an airy, plant-filled apartment. Implicitly, this person has nothing to do but brew coffee, feed their highly photogenic cats, and fill page after page with words.
Under this romantic veneer is a scaffolding of assumed privilege. On some level, the writer is implied to support their lifestyle solely by their work. I would love to say this is an aspirational illusion created by Hollywood, but instead I think it reflects the demographics of successful published authors, which skew heavily towards several axes of social and economic privilege.
For aspiring authors who do not have such a lifestyle, this can be demoralizing and frustrating. We cannot devote whole days to our creative work when we have a job (or jobs) to go to, family to care for, and chores to do just to keep ourselves afloat. We might also be struggling with a health issue, participating in activism, or filling some other critical role in our community.
Personally, I find writing (and creativity in general) to be an important part of self-care. The desire to tell our stories is deeply human and having a space for self-expression that is purely ours and not circumscribed by the needs or conventions of others, is part of how we avoid burning out. At the same time, it can feel like finishing a project is an impossible goal when every scrap of free time is an unpredictable luxury. A more insidious and elitist message is that if we cannot live the romanticized writer lifestyle, if we cannot drop everything to dedicate ourselves to our creative work, we shouldn’t even bother.
Creativity is not a competition or a race. At least, this is what I tell myself regularly, with the assumption that I will eventually internalize this truth. I write on my lunch break or the bus, using Google documents to keep my work with me. Sometimes it’s only a few sentences. Sometimes that has to be enough.