Write During Yearning Hours
Do you ever feel like the sunlight drains you? Or, during the regular 9-5, that the crushing weight of expectations seeps into your bones? I find it hard to shake off the overthinking during the day.
Others have talked about the whole write-during-the-time-of-day you work best idea, but to me this still reeks of the productivity rhetoric that capitalism loves to surround us with. I fall for it, too! I love a good productivity hack. But the more I layer them onto my writing, the heavier it feels. There’s just no way to measure or control or organize art consistently. It’s always slipping out of our grasp.
Enter: Yearning Hours.
I think you understand what I mean by this if you’ve ever been obsessed with a tv show, or read fanfiction, or had a crush on someone. There’s just a certain time, usually at night, when no one is looking for you and you have nothing to do, so all there is to do is want something and wonder about it. Yearning Hours.
I think all writers want something. We get these little aches in our heart or hollow parts in our bodies that we learn to live with. Then we discover art, and we fill it all in with different colors.
I think travelers are like this, too. Always searching for something in themselves, in others, or in the world.
These little, constant wants are easily drowned out by the constant pressures and fast pace of living life. We learn to give our attention towards what makes us money, what makes us happy, what makes us fulfill other peoples’ ideas about ourselves. But sometimes we get those moments to just feel something, and want it.
That’s when writing happens. That’s why I’m a fan of opening up possibilities for process. You don’t need to light a candle and sit at a perfectly organized desk. Ideas visit if you’re lying awake in bed drenched in memory. Pull out the notes app on your phone. Jot something down on a napkin. It doesn’t matter. You feel something, you want something, you have the weapon/tool/blessing that is art to fulfill it.
Inspiration doesn’t always speak to us during the busy day when our attention and energy is focused on staying alive. It whispers to us when we slow down enough to reach for something beyond survival.
What are you yearning for?
