Summer Writing
“My parents were visiting.” 
“My kids had friends over.”
“We were hiking.”
“I had a beach romance.”
“It was too hot.”
“It was time to pick the tomatoes.”
All year we long for summer, when schedules ease and sunshine lasts well into evening. However, when summer comes, too often our writing gets put off until tomorrow and tomorrow. Soon it is Labor Day and we have wasted a summer, again. Our promises to ourselves, our promises to write and edit and submit, have been broken.
What a pathetic statement about our commitment to our art. Or is it? Yes, we make great plans for everything we are going to get done. Our ambitions make us writers. We ache to be hugely productive, yet it takes some of us a long time to learn how to do that.
Am I alone in this? I doubt it. I am not the only one here who loves to write and out of that love imagines summer has no limits. I know of only one sure remedy for the hazards of summer writing, taught me by writer and teacher, Alix Kates Shulman (Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen):
“It is not discipline which is required, but devotion.”
Devotion. Think about it. Not devotion to your career, but devotion to every piece you write. When the golf course lurks outside rather than sleet, devotion can push you–willingly–back to your desk. Imagine the things you have done for your significant other, your children, your pets, your friends, your causes. Don’t your words deserve the same honor? And if you are going to honor them, aren’t they going to shine?
What does devotion look like? I cannot speak for you, but mine looks like notes scribbled on my phone app as I cook dinner; it looks like waking up before the alarm; like letting my toddler pull out a whole box of Kleenexes, just to buy me twenty minutes of quiet time typing away madly; it looks like five minutes of “Write or Die” before bed while my husband finishes his bath.
When you work from devotion rather than discipline, the world is awash with your work. Your job is not to create but to record, not to master but to serve, not to sculpt but to stand in awe. Your words will wait for a long time, and then they will kind of give up. They need love and attention, in modest amounts. What they give back for a bit of devotion is a lifetime of surprise. The more you can move away from fears and hesitancy and move toward trust and excitement, toward curiosity and work, the better your writing. The issue of finding time and motivation simply disappears.