Subtract ... (anxiety about) time
Thick and thin time, and how to use it
‘I always like a painting that’s both thick and thin at the same time.’
This was a passing remark by the Australian artist Jude Rae recently in praise of a painting she’d selected as part of the Vincent Prize, hosted annually by my partner’s art transport company. Her off-the-cuff remark about Stephanie Eather’s ‘Packing the Ranger to Head to Toganmain’ was very compelling to me for some reason, and I tucked it away in my mind.
Around then I’d been lamenting the problem of time in art-making – specifically, the feeling so many of us have that there’s never enough. I for one am always in search of it, trying to guard and protect it, constantly bemoaning the particular lack of that glorious, spacious, uninterrupted time when ‘real work’ can be done. I’d frankly been growing a little depressed about it.
In the days after Jude spoke, though, I realised the source of my gloom was possibly not so much my lack of time, as the way I was conceiving of it. I’d been thinking of time only in terms of its quantity: there are 24 hours in a day, and if other things use some of those hours, that time is unavailable for writing.
But one morning soon after the show I woke with this thought: what if time was like paint? What if there were more to time than simple quantity? What if we could have both ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ time?
I sat on the couch and looked around at the paintings on our walls. Those I liked best did indeed appear to use both thick and thin paint. Sometimes the thinner pigment was an underpainting and hardly visible; sometimes it was a final layer, changing the colour and texture of what was beneath. Sometimes whole parts of a canvas seemed to be made with thin paint, thicker only applied in judicious dabs. None of the pictures would be as interesting if they only used one or the other. They needed both.
I began to think of measuring my ability to write not by the volume of available time, but rather its texture. If I could think of time as a medium to be applied in different ways for different effects, rather than a simple commodity that was available or not, what might happen?
I started to get excited.
‘Thick time’
It’s obvious what ‘thick time’ might mean: that idealised writing time – luxurious, uninterrupted, bountiful, the kind filled with silence and space for idling and walking and resting and reading, time largely available for devotion to a single project. It’s the sort of time one finds most easily in separation from ordinary life – on retreat, or on holidays, when the hours and days seem to stretch out, unscheduled and open before us.
When we think about how serious artists work, this is our default conception of the time at their disposal.
I am fortunate to be writing this newsletter draft at the start of four days of thick time, away from home in a quiet house, with only a few other minor obligations.
When you can get it, thick time allows slow thinking and sustained attention to complex problems. It allows immersion in the work across days, not just a few hours, especially if one is either alone or in the company of other working artists, as I am right now. The thread of connection between one day’s work and the next remains unbroken, sometimes even entering one’s dreams, and concentration and momentum are allowed to build.
These blocks of time are, to me, crucial. I’m lucky enough to find them several times a year, and I while I’ve written many novels while also working at full-time jobs, even then I would try to manage one or more periods of invaluable thick time each year.
‘Thin time’
But while I yearn always for thick time, thin is the type I normally get, especially in the midst of year of travelling and public speaking for book promotion. Thin time means a half-hour or several fitted in between other obligations - interviews, teaching, festivals, travel administration, life administration. Enough for scribbling notes or catching the edge of an idea, but not for exploring its full meaning or import.
My thin time is filled with the ‘outwardness’ I discussed in the last newsletter - public-facing, social-media oriented, filled with interruptions, bitsy and distracted. I’ve increasingly come to see this thin time as deficient, even largely useless.
But many artists reading this will rarely or never manage to find thick time, especially if they have children or other exhausting and demanding responsibilities – babies or ageing parents to care for, housing instability, troubled teenagers, full-time jobs and/or supporting others through the normal travails of life.
I don’t know how it is possible to consistently make good work when only thin time is available, but I know it has been done. The painter Ann Thomson told me that when her two daughters were small, she painted in the night after they were in bed and before she began teaching work the next day. In this excellent piece about Ruth Park by Tegan Bennett Daylight there’s a famous photograph of Park typing at her table while a toddler plays between her feet. Park’s literary output was staggering in the face of unending physical and mental labour, poverty and violence. Talk about thin time.
I’m not saying Park’s is an existence to aspire to. But when I find myself whining about my terrible lack of writing time while I spend swathes of it doomscrolling on news sites or sucked into an Instagram reel vortex or flipping between streaming channels, the examples of Park and Thomson, or Oodgeroo Noonuccal or Frida Kahlo, or single mother-of-five 1960s folk singer Rosalie Sorrels or any of the other thousands of artists who have overcome enormous real obstacles to make their work – well, perspective is a fine thing, is all I’m saying.
‘Enabling limitations’
Sometimes too much freedom is a trap. And I’ve always loved the way creative thinkers take problems and turn them into solutions.
Screenwriter David Roach told me years ago[i], for example, that the budget limits imposed by film were often advantageous.
‘I love the constraints and restrictions. They force you to find new ways to be creative and original … It’s sort of a little chess game, where you’re shifting things around, asking how can I make the story better by making the production smaller? And you know what? Many times it ends up a much better story.’
In a similar vein, writer Sigrid Nunez told me that on starting a novel she tries to create ‘a narrow frame’ because she finds the open possibilities at this stage too overwhelming. ‘I want things to be narrowed down, to home in on something …because I want to go deep rather than broad.’ And when visual artist Karla Dickens was at art school she couldn’t afford to buy paint, so began collecting bits of rubbish on her way to art school and using that instead – so beginning her incredible body of found-object and collage works.
If budgets and narrowed subject matter and lack of ‘proper’ materials can be considered helpful limitations, then why not time? Why not transform thin time into something especially useful?
I’ve already experienced the liberation of radically reducing the amount of time available for a long work. Years ago, in conversation with the excellent psychologist Alison Manning, I yet again lamented the slowness of my progress. It was late October, I think, when I told her I wouldn’t finish my draft until the following March. I’d lost momentum, and my writing life felt like one of those doomed artic expeditions, a slow, depressing, futile trudge. Still, it couldn’t be helped. I sighed, pointed myself towards March and prepared to trudge.
Alison said – casually, shockingly – ‘Why don’t you just finish it before Christmas instead?’
I was confused. I’d already explained all the reasons it was taking so long; there was so much still to do, I had other competing jobs and projects to complete. Finishing my draft before Christmas was impossible. She understood all of that, Alison said. But then shrugged. ‘Why not do it by Christmas anyway?’
With that simple, sly question, something bright flared inside me: a surge of energy and excitement. Imagine hacking three months off the time I was allowing myself! Imagine how it would feel! And so I did – I put my head down and went for it. It was done before Christmas.
I came to know this was what psychologists call an ‘enabling limitation’. Anyone who works best to a deadline knows it - the paradoxical truth that sometimes drawing in the boundaries, creating more pressure, giving yourself fewer options is what creates energy and momentum and allows one to work more effectively.
Thin time as necessity
But back to Jude Rae’s words about paint. In her speech she said that in choosing the finalists for the show, she was looking for artists who had ‘an understanding of mediums, used in a sensitive way’. I wanted to know more – so I asked her to elaborate, and we talked by phone.
She told me that the origin of her desire for both thick and thin paint was twofold: first, observation of painters she admired, and second, ‘an abhorrence of relying on a single solution, of only having one set of answers to problems that will always change’.
It came also from her dissatisfaction, as an emerging artist, with her own inability to use thick paint. She felt ‘compromised’, especially among her colleagues at the time, by being a ‘thin painter’. Interestingly, she didn’t actually want to make the kind of pictures that those who ‘slathered the paint around’ created. Yet she still wanted to broaden her range of skill. She looked to painters like Rembrandt and Velasquez: ‘There’s a lot of variation in the way they made the paint behave,’ she told me. ‘[A picture] can be so much more if you have a broad repertoire.’
Everything Jude said seemed very potent, and easily applied to my new notion of time. If I allow ‘thick time’ to be my only solution, then I severely curtail my writing life, and a sense of scarcity and precarity rules. But if I can change my perception of ‘thin time’ and consider it a different but equally necessary medium, to be used appropriately and skilfully, everything opens up. Even just thinking in this way has instantly taken a sense of internal pressure off my work in progress. Bizarrely, it suddenly feels as if I have all the time in the world.
Thin time as noticing time
For me, thin time often means being ‘in the world’ when I would rather be out of it. My longing for privacy, inwardness, quietude and solitude is deep and real. But I believe a novelist must also live properly in the world for a good portion of the time in order to be able to write about it.
Paradoxically I have also more than once had the panicky feeling, when I finally get my precious, long-desired thick time, that I have not brought enough imaginative material into this quiet space with me. I have the ridiculous realisation that I’ve been recklessly squandering all that glorious, bountiful, material-gathering thin time – standing at the bakery counter, sitting in the doctor’s waiting room, pushing the supermarket trolley, and generally nudging up against the joys and sorrows of ordinary life in Saul Bellow’s ‘humanity bath’ .
The key to making thin time a creative medium is, I conclude now, very simple and at the same time very difficult: pay attention.
I recently watched the documentary Cy Dear, about the great painter Cy Twombly. His creative life appears to have been outlandishly luxurious - absolutely filled with thick time, and somehow also filled with money, supportive friends and spouse and son, not to mention success, on and off, from an early stage. And yet those interviewed spoke often of how difficult it was for him to make art. By the end of the film, I came to understand that the difficulty, and the exhaustion, came from something most of us never will achieve: Twombly’s paying of the utmost attention, at all times, to the smallest moments.
He was a sponge, soaking up his surroundings day and night, carefully attending to the outer and as well, perhaps even more importantly, his inner world.
Photographer and writer Sally Mann, one of Twombly’s friends at the end of his life, referred to this attending as a very intentional ‘susceptibility’:
‘We were close. I think it was because he so repeatedly emphasised the importance of being susceptible to beauty at all times - and even in the most improbable of places. Even in the Walmart parking lot, or these jaw-droppingly tacky yard sales that he insisted on going to. He practised that his whole life, and that was such an important thing for me, at that time in my career, to learn.’
Another friend, artist Barbara Crawford, recalled Twombly taking note of a purple sponge on her kitchen sink one evening when he came for dinner. ‘That’s purple,’ he said to himself. Soon purple began appearing in his new pictures.
Such noticing might sound trivial, or pleasant and easy, but I doubt many of us are capable of this level of sustained attention as a way of life. Make no mistake: this depth of attention takes discipline, and it takes effort. But it also offers deep possibilities for transforming thin time into art.
How to pay attention?
One of the causes of my recent gloom was the feeling that all my time was organised around other people’s needs. But as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Creativity: The psychology of discovery and invention: ‘There is no best way to structure our actions; however, it is important not to let either chance or external routine automatically dictate what we will do … what matters is not whether one keeps to a strict or to a flexible schedule; what counts is to be master of one’s own time.’
The key word here is automatically – of course there are times when external routine and chance must dictate our use of time, but not always. And one way of fending off a feeling of drudgery is to change one’s own time use. My earlier story about pulling my own self-imposed deadline forward to create impetus and momentum is an example. But I could equally gain energy at a different time by loosening the boundaries and giving myself much more time. With a little awareness, a sense of authority over my own time grows larger and a whole creative life feels more possible.
Contemporary life is absolutely crammed with distractions and multi-tasking and interruptions, not to mention our wearying obsession with ‘hacks’ and acceleration and productivity. But paying attention forces us to turn away from these things, to slow down, and take charge of all the moments of our days.
If I spend my time intentionally, rather than reactively, I find the thinnest of moments - in the car, in the waiting room or the supermarket queue or sweeping the kitchen floor - opening up in surprising ways. Just this morning I noticed three hitherto unseen things in my usual environment that I can take straight into my novel.
And, while paying careful attention to the trees along the road on a very familiar drive, just the right name for a character popped into my head. This latter effect feels almost miraculous - that attending closely to one thing brings progress in quite another. Michael McGirr evoked this in a mention of Simone Weil in his recent review of Ailsa Piper’s For Life:
In a justly famous essay about education, for example, Weil wrote “the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies”. By this, she does not mean the “muscular effort” that keeps a student chained to their books. She means allowing oneself to be so lost in wonder that one is “penetrated by the object”. Weil used to take her students outside in the hope that their attention would be simultaneously captured and liberated.
‘Simultaneous capture and liberation’ - what a perfect description of how paying attention can work, if you let it.
There are of course basic and very important thin-time management strategies that can help open up pockets of thicker time. But time management is not the same as paying attention and susceptibility to beauty - these require a deeper, more open and generous, intentional participation in the moment. They require slowing down, forgetting about ‘usefulness’ and ‘management’ altogether, and just opening your senses to what the world has to offer. I swear the more I practise this - driving without also listening to a podcast, grocery shopping while also watching the people and textures and colours around me - the more attuned I become to the world and what it has to offer my writing.
Stopping is making
In our phone conversation, Jude Rae raised one last essential point.
‘There’s a lot to be said for turning away from what you are doing,’ she said. ‘And if that turning away is not necessarily at a time or under conditions of your choosing, well maybe it really makes little difference in the end.’
We all know this. The walk to clear the head, the ‘waiting and suspending’ I talked about in The Luminous Solution and elsewhere as one of the hallmarks of creative thinking, Vicki Hastrich’s period of ‘going fallow’ as a way of reviving a flagging artistic spirit. Letting go of the need to work, whether we choose it or not, so often leads to small and large breakthroughs when we return.
Why do we always forget this, fretting and fretting?
Time and again I have had to ‘turn the painting to the wall’, and when later I’ve turned my novel back again I’ve found my time away from it has bestowed me with gifts of depth and experience to write straight into the work. Maybe the best thin-time approach of all is this acceptance: letting go but staying susceptible to beauty. Stop resisting, allow the ordinary to cast its spell, and attend.
[i] Writer’s Room Interviews 2013
These newsletters are fast becoming a creative masterclass x
Just loved this. I'm currently writing an essay on my unwanted proclivities to rushing and can tell I will be citing your substack in it!! I also just bought Beth Pickens book, make your art no matter what, first chapter "Time is a hostage to the powers of perception "...