Writing in the Time Of—Oh, There Is No Time

In the Winter Quarter of 2024, I became proficient at two things: breaking fevers in one day, and making things much, much harder than they had to be.

Winter in Santa Barbara has always been more concept than anything else. If it is ever a concrete thing, it’s wet. And winter quarter of 2024 was exceptionally, almost incredulously, wet. Tree branches flung themselves across the walkways between my dorm and dining hall. Classes were canceled due to flood warnings. Parents called about possible evacuations.

There is a specific, defiant attitude UCSB students hold against winter here. After being caught in an IV coffee shop with no umbrella, I dredged home with a friend in the torrential downpour in nothing but a scarf and trenchcoat. Later, on the way to our friend’s party, we joked about recreating it in the coming thunderstorm but “better dressed” this time (in swimsuits). When classes were canceled and parents called, my hallmates huddled in the lounge and laughed about their concern. Most of us are from the SF Bay Area, where winter has sharper teeth and layers serve a realistic purpose. I imagine we saw the thunderstorms and just thought of spring in Berkeley.

There is also, unfortunately, a specific, defiant attitude UCSB students hold against being sick. No matter how responsible you are in the beginning, how much you isolate, or how many shots of Dayquil you down to feel better, the ratio of late assignments to days spent resting becomes too alarming, and you get sloppy. You start to bargain with yourself that I’ll rest over the weekend and After this assignment, I’ll lay back down. You don’t, of course. There’s always another one, and fever reducers are pretty cheap, anyway. What I’m trying to say is that in the pit of winter quarter, we were all wet, we were all sick, and despite the sniffling, frayed pride, we were all miserable.

I’ve always had the habit of developing stress fevers, nursing them over the course of a week, breaking them on the weekend, and entering the next week with another growing behind my temple. I’ve developed a system for these things; the exact dosage of drugs and liters of water I need to drink tally in my head like a balance sheet. I feel like golden age sci-fi. When Fiona Apple wrote “Extraordinary Machine” she was talking about me, actually. Sometimes I feel like the only way I can achieve the efficiency I crave is to quantify it clinically; the state of my body hardly matters as long as it’s moving forward. I’m sick, but look how fast I can make myself better. Pull out the stopwatch. Lap.

I’m five classes deep into a schedule I promised would be better than last quarter’s (it’s not), outlining a fiction piece that was supposed to be a maximum of ten pages (again, no), and trying to find time to both keep up lying to myself and genuinely get things done. I have a habit of forgoing anything I may enjoy if I don’t believe I have enough time to accommodate, which really means I never do anything fun. I’m incredibly predictable, in either a study spot or my dorm, working, or trying very, very hard to do anything I could reasonably call “work.” At the end of the day, the hours are gone and I still have to write.

What’s circling the drain at the bottom of all this—the wet winter, the collective misery, the fevers, the endless, endless writing—is: I need to get outta here! I need to leave my shoebox dorm room that I’ve been pacing for three days because I’m sick again, but it might be infectious this time; I need to actually, seriously touch grass; I need to see the sun and be reminded of the small animal that I am. A pathetic ant crawling from a hole, humbled cosmically.

So that becomes the question I ask myself: how do I humble myself cosmically, and please, god, how do I still find time to write?

There are twelve coffee shops in or around UCSB. By the time this excursion of mine is over, I’ll have visited eight. One of the professors within W&L posits the virtues of what she calls “F*ck Off Fridays,” which are exactly how they sound. I decide to adopt the habit, try it out like a new coat for a while, and see if it fits right. I start leaving campus at seven in the morning, two in the afternoon, or whenever I can get around class. Fridays are the days I don’t have any classes, so I truly feel I embody this faith I’ve taken up; I’m a real disciple by week two. I take the free bus line and think of home; I see hummingbirds and bougainvillea outside the windows as we take an hour to get halfway to downtown. The rain dotting the windows trickles iridescent and harmless. It’s a grueling pace that should set my productivity anxiety on fire, but I love it. I love my bus travelers. I love the cappuccinos I always order and the bagels from Java Station I get on the side. I love getting lost and always being directed by someone’s kindness. I feel human again, a little bit. I’m a bug with warm feelings on the inside.

But I’m still not writing. Or rather, I don’t write like I want. I find it doesn’t matter whether I sit in the library or a cafe for eight hours a day staring at a document; my workflow remains essentially the same. I often feel that this myth of “the perfect writing system” consistently pokes around writing spaces. The writing community of YouTube blooms with “I Tried ____’s Writing System for 30 Days” videos. Aesthetic slides of “How to Write More” Instagram posts and Tumblr writing tip masterlists pop up like weeds. We all want that perfect spigot of productivity. We all walk around reassuring each other that it doesn’t exist, that it’s just discipline, but there are degrees to discipline, aren’t there? There’s doing the work, and then there’s work that’s produced. It’s one thing to get up at nine to sit in a cafe to write, but it’s another to actually have a complete document by the time you leave. You may even go in with the realistic expectation that doing this won’t solve all your problems but at least make them more pliable. In some ways, it feels worse when they aren’t, like they’ve suddenly changed the answer to a riddle they promised was simple. You turned on the promised spigot and nothing came. There comes an urge to turn eight hours into twelve, to crunch the balls of your feet into the earth and run laps and laps, to turn the work into penance instead. To make yourself sick.

Throughout all the coffee shops, I tried very hard not to make myself sick. This is a conscious act most people find trivial, but writers can be so dramatic sometimes that I think the urge to suffer for our art comes with our desire to create it. The answer, if there is one, to “How do I write when there’s no time and I need to get out of here?” is really just: Get out of there. “There” could be physical (your university, your keyhole-sized dorm room), or it could be sticky the way most subconscious things are. Your old routine. Your friends. Your perception of what you’re creating. Seriously, your perception of what you’re creating.

Not every assignment is going to be your magnum opus. Likely, nothing you create in college will be your magnum opus. Much of it will be good, but not a lot will be great, and that’s okay. Go into writing believing your magnum opus is ten years on the horizon and still a speck in your eyelash. Unfortunately, the answer to “How do I write when I have no time?” is you must make time. Carve it out with a knife or your fingernails if you have to. Go to eight different coffee shops. But take transit twenty minutes slower than the most efficient route. Carving time to work also necessitates carving time to enjoy some of that time, as well. This is the part that hurts, but you have to do it. Remember, cosmically humbled!

My writing is still largely unfinished; only Act 1 of 3 is completed, and sometimes carving out time feels like shaving the thinnest sliver of skin from a fruit. But I claw it out with my fingernails and make time to pick blackberries around my house, too. The rain comes and I take the time to cover myself with a coat. I’m an ant that can only crawl so fast, after all.