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| Seahorse Sketch by Gail M. Pfeifer, RN, MA |
Tips on writing can take you so far; it takes some effort to turn off external distractions and actually sit down to write. In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf talks about writing fiction and asks why, over the course of history (specifically Elizabethan times), so much great literature was written by men and so little by women. Her train of thought—distractions included—leads her to explore how women lived during that time period, and, as the picture unfolds for her, she concludes that women needed (and still needed, in Woolf’s own time,) “…rooms of our own…” and “…the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think….” But women, with their multiple tasks and lower salaries imposed by society, lacked the ability and funds to carve out the space and time to write.
Although society has progressed in many ways regarding the status of women, Woolf’s assessment that men write more than women do remains close to the mark today. And even if women have more opportunities to write now, their work is published less than men’s, according to the Web site VIDA. (Look at their 2010 Count, which shows current information on the percentage of writing done by men and by women that year in various publications.) Woolf’s conclusion that women need a room of their own acknowledges that writing takes concentration, silence, and focus—circumstances rare in daily life. (And I speak of women writers, because, although men are entering nursing in increasing numbers, the nursing profession is still primarily composed of women.) Assuming that most of you reading this blog are nurses, you know the role of multitasking, not only in your jobs, but in your lives, and multitasking is the enemy of writing.
Writing also requires that one have power, the power to stop multitasking and to carve out a space and time to work. Consider that a memoir, for example, is about 35,000 to 40,000 words in length (go to any book on Amazon.com and look at “text stats”). If you wrote just 100 words every day, by the end of the year you would have a book…. “No time!” you may be saying, “for even 100 words a day, and no space to write in. You just don’t understand.” To that I would ask “Do you want to write, or not?” If so—and whether you are a man or a woman—use your power, your desire, and the resources at hand, and find the space and time to do it.
