Frugality in Friendship (for the Sake of Writing)

This may sound strange, but one area of my life in which I’ve been practicing being more frugal lately is in my friendships. I’m not doing this in an effort to save money – though staying home at night and on weekends does have that desirable effect on my bank account – it’s an attempt to conserve time and devote more of it to my writing. Not my freelance writing, but the kind of writing that earned me my MFA.

While I’m quite disciplined about the way I structure my time for my freelance gigs, I sometimes lose steam when it comes to writing in my “non-work” hours. I would much rather go out and do fun things with my friends, especially if they are performing or having art or film openings. Often, the last thing I want to do is sit around and write more after writing all day, even if it is the thing that I most deeply do want to do.

“No human activity I know of takes more time than writing…. Of necessity the writer is unlike those of [her] friends who quit work at five,” wrote John Gardener in On Becoming a Novelist. For me, it’s a conundrum, and it always has been since I realized I was a writer. Read the rest of this entry »