I had plans of reading during every spare moment today, which I’ve actually have done, but the spare moments were more rare than anticipated. Between homeschooling, working in the garden, preparing meals (haven’t cleaned up from the meals yet, saved some time there), and taking the girls to swimming lessons, I’ve totaled just over an hour of reading time – and that was before the kids woke up. Sigh.
I decided to read ATLAS SHRUGGED first and realized that I lied in my previous post – I haven’t read it. And I’m embarrassed by that. All great writers should be familiar with the classics, the books that marked significant changes in the literary world. I have no one to blame but myself (and all the teachers I had in high school and the professors in the English College I attended who never encouraged me to read beyond the required list! Tsk…tsk). But now my education is mine to lead, to mold, to decide what kind of a learner I want to be and then be that teacher that will squeeze the most out of…me.
My first impressions of Ayn Rand’s writing is pure respect. Words crafted so smoothly into elegant foreshadowing and character description. To emulate that, I will practice painting a picture of my character with words, to mold as sculpture with ink and letters, describing the way my character holds her chin when defending herself, the way she tucks her hair behind her ear as a means of giving herself time to think before she responds. Dagny Taggart is described as a sharp, angular woman; an intelligent business woman whose railroad empire has hardened her appearance to match the straight lines of the tracks she owns to the structure of her face and body. We are what we eat; we are what we do. The careers we choose (or fall into) mold our faces with relentless stress or joy or blandness. A personal trainer would have the refined lines of muscles, the trim waist and Addidas clothing. Stereotype? Sure. Then a great character study might be of the Personal Trainer who suffers from a food addiction and the ongoing struggle to ‘look the part’.
I’m always surprised with characters who are extremely tired. When the reader first meets Dagny in ATLAS SHRUGGED, we don’t know that she is a Taggart (the wealthy family who owns Taggart Transcontinental Railroad Co.) until the other characters realize it, but she’s adamant to stay awake, as if sleep will take away her clarity of mind. I’m curious to see what her future behaviors will be, if her exhaustion plays an important role or if her refusal to sleep is more of a tool to show the intensity of her purpose for returning to New York.
My question for today…What can I give up that is currently interfering with my writing and reading time?
The distraction is clear – television. We, as a family, don’t watch much television, but in the evenings I watch a half-hour or so before bed. That’s 30 minutes I could write. Or read. Or learn something I didn’t know before. But the temptation is still present and needed a drastic step - I’ve canceled our cable service!
I’ve already taken one step – I wake up an hour earlier. I thought it would be a difficult transition, but I’ve been happy to wake up at 5:30 and pour that cup of coffee and read. (I must be honest – as I’m writing this, it’s 4:00 in the afternoon after a very busy day, I have a meeting at church tonight and haven’t started dinner yet and am drinking – correction, have finished – a beer. Ah!)
Outside of giving up television and waking early, the only other thing that interferes with writing is my family, but I’m not willing to give them up. I homeschool my daughters, but that isn’t something I’m going to give up either – priorities still stand stronger than deadlines.
Not long ago I read – somewhere – about a writing group who met at each other houses instead of coffee shops where the noise was too distracting and the coffee to expensive. The pressure to have a clean home was interfering with the writing, so the members decided that if the house was too clean then they would know that member wasn’t writing as much as they should. In looking around my house, it appears that I’ve given up the daily de-cluttering process and cleaning the kitchen. Pretty sure that I’ve saved over an hour of time there. Seems a fair trade.
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