The Secret Class

How to make regular writing a given.



By Julie Marie Wade






Whether you’re a writer just beginning to submit work for publication, a writer who has fallen out of the submission habit and is looking to build it back, or a writer who submits regularly and has been widely published, the ideal—and the struggle—we all share is to keep generating new work. No matter how busy you are with the demands of authorship, not to mention the demands of the rest of your life. 



One strategy I’ve used since college is the phenomenon of the “extra class.” At 19, I told my friends I was registered for a fifth class, a secret class that met on the silent floor of the library. I didn’t mention that the syllabus consisted entirely of focused time to write, or that it had exactly one student enrolled—me.



It was common for us back then to leave a note on the whiteboards posted on our dorm room doors, letting people know where we were and/or when we would be back. If you were “in class” or “at work,” I’d noticed, people didn’t ask too many questions. They accepted that these activities were essential, not optional. But if you said you were playing Frisbee on the quad or hanging out in the Student Center, your friends were likely to come and find you. They understood these were just fun things people did to “kill time,” by their nature both joinable and interruptible. 



Not so with a class.



I meticulously scheduled my secret class on my calendar, some semesters for two longer blocks each week and some semesters for three shorter blocks each week, depending on my actual class and work schedule. But the practice was the same, and it sustained me. I had built in a time to write when I knew no one would interrupt me, or even come looking for me. This was time set aside beyond homework, beyond the other responsibilities and requirements of my life, and by calling it a class, I didn’t have to defend its value to anyone. 



I came to look forward to my secret class, sometimes nearly giddy as the time approached, and I found the ideas for what I would write next percolated more readily during the intervals between those sessions. With anticipation came increased productivity, both during the time set aside for the secret class and also during the time outside it, and I was able to generate far more work than even what my creative writing professors required. I can still remember walking to the library, nearly breaking into a sprint, the words beginning to flow before I could even write them down.



For the nine years following my college graduation, I carried on the tradition of the secret class, through three successive graduate programs. As before, my peers took a class obligation seriously; there was no need to justify the time I was unavailable. Even now, as a professor of creative writing, my secret class has become the “extra class” I teach rather than the extra class I take—and it still functions precisely the same way. 



For folks whose lives aren’t already organized around academic classes, this concept is equally applicable. Maybe you go to a yoga class or play in a recreational sports league or wait for your children at their weekly swim practice, for instance. There are things in your life, in all our lives, shared on the family calendar; activities taken seriously enough that no one would expect you to miss them, barring an actual emergency. 



You paid in advance.



You’re doing it for your kids.



Your teammates are counting on you.



It’s important for self-care.  



These are all excellent reasons to explain serious time commitments, and what we have to remember is that writing isn’t any less important than any of them. Our creative output has intrinsic worth, not contingent on payment or publication—though without a consistent investment of time, it’s harder to pursue payment or publication for the intrinsically worthwhile writing we do.



When we schedule writing as an un-missable commitment in our lives and head to a discrete location to honor it—or when we carve out time to be home alone and schedule specific writing intervals that allow us to turn off our electronic summoners and devote ourselves entirely to the practice at hand (I find that setting a timer keeps me from looking at the clock and allows me to focus even more fully on my words), we retrain our minds to expect the consistency that a sustained writing practice requires. These intervals don’t have to be long, but they do have to be regular. Once we can count on their regularity, we’re able to maintain this core writing practice no matter how much work, authoring and otherwise, supports everything else in our lives. Instead of “maybe getting around to it” or “hopefully I’ll have time soon,” writing becomes a given of every week, month, quarter, semester, and season—or however you measure time.



________



Learning to make time for writing? Join Julie for the CRAFT TALKS webinar, Making Time, Making Art: Navigating the Writer/Author Divide. More info/register here. $25 ($15 early bird).



JULIE MARIE WADE is a member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University in Miami. A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, she is the author of many collections of poetry and prose, including two collaborative essay collections written with Denise Duhamel and Brenda Miller. Wade’s newest projects are Fugue: An Aural History (Diagram New Michigan Press, 2023) and Otherwise: Essays (Autumn House Press, 2023), selected by Lia Purpura for the 2022 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Book Prize.