Snowbound Scribbler
Last weekend, Winter Storm Fern brought forth snow, ice, bitter cold—and, for me, several long, wearying days in front of my computer.
No, I was not monitoring the forecast but instead pecking out the half-dozen or so articles I either had due early the following week or at least had to start getting into shape for delivery not long thereafter. Being the professional wordsmith that I am, I would have undoubtedly been attending to some of these articles over the weekend even if the weather had remained merely seasonably brisk for Ohio at this time of the year. But in the days before the storm hit, I saw the radar pictures, and the big blob that, for most, represented the unpleasant prospect of a glimpse of life in Siberia, but for me, the crushing weight of my deadlines.
The storm, I could see, would be so bad that I would have no excuse but to sit down and write—a task I have been doing all of my adult life but about which I often find myself in agreement with the great American humorist S.J. Perelman. “I do it only in order to support myself, and not for any pleasure that I possibly get out of it,” Perelman said of his struggles with writing in an interview on the public television show Day at Night in 1974.
In the weekly routine I have established in furtherance of, like Perelman, supporting myself by way of keyboard, I often view the weekend as a respite. In this, I am not so different than most working stiffs. I might see a movie for a review due the following week, but I will often give myself until Sunday evening to start writing it. I jealously hoard Saturday as a day when I might browse at a bookstore, go on a day trip, or treat myself to a meal out. It is not generally in my thinking to weld myself to the chair beside my computer to continue the torture I subject myself to Monday through Friday—the torture that was so well articulated by Perelman: extracting sentences from my brain for the promise of pay.
Yet I knew as well as the rest of us that Winter Storm Fern was going to keep me tethered to home. Ominously, the zoo announced it would shut down ahead of the storm, and I could see that the projected snowfall would be sufficient to put a damper on my usual Saturday activities. Even the movie I had to review that weekend was available on Netflix. Like it or not, I was going nowhere, and had little else to do but write.
Of course, I could have busied myself around the house without crossing the threshold of my home office—the space I scrupulously avoid except when committed to doing actual work. (This is not as odd as it sounds: How many people blessed with normal jobs would hang out at their place of employment during off-hours?) I could have reorganized my movie collection for the thousandth time, or sorted my winter sweaters by fabric, age or frequency of use. But the professional that resides within me—the voice that has kept me employed in this gig for so many years—was also aware that with Fern came the serious risk of power outages. I became gripped by the fear that I would lose power without having completed my next wave of articles, let alone having filed them. Disaster.
So I got to it. Last Saturday, with its spookily quiet premonition of imminent bad weather, would be devoted to long periods of concentrated work. I soon realized, or admitted, what I actually knew all along: Being snowbound—as I was by Sunday morning—was not an impediment to writing but inducement to it. Denied the option of distracting myself with outside activities, the words came readily, easily, even cheerfully. What had annoyed me about being compelled to work that weekend was not the fear that I would be unproductive but that I would be too productive. Stephen King got it all wrong: Attempting to write a novel while in an old hotel in the bleak midwinter, as Jack Torrance does in The Shining, does not automatically lead to lunacy, but is likely to result in the efficient completion of said novel! Like all of us, I am loath to deny myself a break from work, but how can I permit myself such a break if the work is proceeding pleasantly? Would this mean I would be compelled to similarly toil each time a major weather event came through my area?
By Monday, my fear of losing power had somewhat abated, so I took my foot off the pedal and settled into more casual writing habits as I finished up what I had started. I was even mildly late in sending some of the pieces I had labored over so conscientiously that weekend. This will not come as a surprise to any editor who has ever worked with me, including the editors of this column—penned days after the winter storm but in my usual spirit of writerly discontent.
On the whole, I must admit that the burst of work I did during Fern gave me an unusual head start on my writing week. Inevitably, I will confront another raft of deadlines next week—I just hope I won’t need another winter storm to meet them.
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