There's Never Enough Time to Write
The Main Newsletter
Hello, and welcome to Sitting in Silence, which will be celebrating three years in 2025.
Ten years ago, I was working my most labor-intensive job. Being a corporate lawyer pays well, but you pay the price mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Corporate lawyers don’t have off days. If a client in London wants to have a teleconference before the sun rises, you can’t say no. If your boss sends you a text message at midnight asking for a solution to a problem before dawn, you can’t say no.
In 2014, I was a veteran lawyer, but I was working harder than ever. I thought dreaming about work was bad enough, but as I sit here writing this on a Sunday morning, I recall being in the office on a Sunday morning back then and wondering how my life had come to such a pass.
I was stressed out. My face looked strange in the mirror. I had lost a bunch of weight and not in a good way. I tend to overeat in hard times, not the other way around, so this was sign that I was so anxious that I no longer enjoyed eating a pint of mint chocolate ice cream on a Friday night. But I must contend with a hard truth.
This was qualitatively the most productive time of my life.
I wrote my first book We Cast a Shadow between 2012 and 2016, so 2014 was smack dab in the middle of that process. Shadow is a tense, anxiety-filled book about being marginalized in America. There’s plenty of gallows humor, but it is a very dark tale. Readers reported feeling disturbed at several points in the narrative. One reader once said something along the lines of thanks for the nightmares. You’re welcome, dear reader.
To paraphrase, Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan, I wrote that book while jetting like a runaway slave. I stole time to write in my office, right under my employer’s nose. I wrote on planes flying towards depositions (this is the literal jetting part). There was not a single instance where I had more than perhaps two and a half hours to write. Mind you, I knew plenty of writers who lived the positively lavish experience of sitting in a coffee shop for 8 straight hours and working. I wasn’t jealous. I just wished, more than anything, that I was one of them.
I never became one of them. Instead, I developed a jittery writing style. Fifteen minutes in the foyer of a judge’s chambers. Twenty minutes while chugging coffee during a stop before work. An hour (oh God, an hour felt like such a luxury!) if my boss told me to stand back and stand by for a potential weekend teleconference.
And like most people in less-than-ideal situations, I adapted. I compensated enough that I became good at writing as a nervous wreck. I could bang out a chapter draft in about 35 minutes. But the page count was never the thing. The thing was that the book was riddled with the insecurity that story called for. And that gave it a strange power.
But no one can live in terror forever.
I made subtle changes over the years that added up to one big change: I now have more time. I took less demanding law jobs. Then I left the field altogether. I spent more time with writers who were as outlandishly, almost cartoonishly dedicated to writing their books as I was. I started a career in academia where research and creativity are often rewarded.
Now, when I sit down to write, I no longer feel like I’m stealing. Sometimes I miss that outlaw part of my life, but I wouldn’t go back. My earlier books were often about the fight for freedom in a society that would deny same. My current work is about what we do once we win that freedom. I’m not sure whether I know the answer yet. That’s why I’m writing the present book. When I figure it out, you’ll see it on a shelf near you.
A heartfelt thanks to the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. I was the inaugural recipient of their Distinguished Excellence in Literary Arts award. The honor came with a beautiful ironwork lapel pin from Mignon Faget. Such are the highs and lows of my life in 2024.
Happy Thanksgiving! I like this holiday because it’s a great time to just be with those we love.
This is also a good time to remind you that my books make wonderful presents for the reader in your life. Support your local bookstore or get Ruffin books through Bookshop.org.
If you’re up to it, leave a comment and let me know how you’re doing. I saw Wicked over the weekend and enjoyed it.
Making more time to write, and filling the rest of my time with things that brush up against writing productively, always feel like great north stars to me.
Always an inspiration, Maurice! You're living one of my favorite quotes by Robert Hass, which is "You can do your life's work in fifteen minutes a day." Now, I have a living, breathing, best-selling authors to point to as evidence whenever I repeat that to someone!