On With Your Story

She must NOT be writing a memoir! The baby would be crying and the counter would be full of dishes, don't you think?

I can hear you. You want to write a memoir. You know the material well-after all you lived it. You’ve thought about it for years, even started writing-several times. What’s holding you back?

Paul Graham puts his finger on a big part of the problem in a July 2009 essay he calls “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.” Of course, he is writing mostly about computer programming, not memoir writing. But programmers have something in common with writers. Their tasks are difficult and take time. Graham knows all about this because he is both a writer and a programmer.

Manager-type schedules break the day up into one-hour increments. Makers, such as memoir writers, can’t even get started in one hour, let along make any progress. They need much bigger hunks of time. “A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in,” says Graham. Hasn’t this happened to you? You work a manager’s schedule all day and in the evenings you have other things that need tending. You can’t find four uninterrupted hours together, what with school activities, committee meetings, picking up the dry cleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, washing, etc, etc, etc.

To get his “making” done, Graham goes so far devise this solution:

“I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.” I would guess that Graham was single at the time.

As for me, I write from 5 to 9 AM, and I try to schedule meetings after 2 PM.

Some writer’s seem to be able to work in smaller blocks of time. I recall Jim Lehrer saying in an interview that he writes on airplane flights, but maybe he meant 7-hour flights to Europe.

If you are working on a memoir or family history, when do you write? How do you manage the demands of the “manager’s schedule” and the “maker’s schedule?”