What's in an hour? Inspiration from The Vinyl Room

On the creative power of an undistracted hour

I made this slightly creepy image with Dall-E.

One thing I love about teaching is the inspiration I get when my students start writing, creating, and making something beautiful. Such is the case with

The Vinyl Room

by Andres Celati. I first had the pleasure of reading Andres’s work when he was a student in my Writing for Substack class in February (the new session starts April 12). Andres’s most recent post, The Vinyl Hour, really spoke to me. It’s about records, but it is also about attention and so much more.

“What’s in an hour?” Andres asks. “What’s in a record?”

Andres wakes up an hour before necessary each day to do one thing: “To listen to a record. On vinyl. Uninterrupted. With no distractions.” (You can read and listen to the post here).

You can bring this uninterrupted hour to anything in your life to make the day more meaningful: meditation, reading, exercise, cooking…and, of course, writing.

photo by Diane Picchiotiino on upsplash

As someone who has been writing for most of my life, I know the power of an uninterrupted early morning hour¹. And yet, it’s always easier to stay in bed than to get up and embrace that hour. During college, I lived in a big, old house with four male housemates. Early in the morning I would pull a folding chair up to the card table in the little room at the bottom of the stairs to write stories on my Corona Selectric “word processor,” which was just a typewriter with a tiny “screen” and a floppy disc. When my son was small and typewriters felt like a distant dream from a past life, I gave myself the luxury of the predawn hour out of necessity. If I didn’t wake up before he did, I could not read or write or have a cup of coffee.

But as the years passed and my days became more my own, I often let that hour pass, thinking I could recover it later in the day, when I would be alone. You can rarely truly recover it, however. That’s because there is nothing quite as sweet at the early hour for writing without distraction. It’s the quiet of the hour and the sense of possibility that makes it so special and full of possibility.

my writing desk, though I usually write in bed or on the couch

Haruki Murakami told the Paris Review that he begins writing at 4:00 am when he is working on a novel. Ernest Hemingway and Toni Morrison also began their writing days very early in the morning. Virginia Woolf started writing in the morning too, but not until 9:30, after she’d had breakfast with her husband, which is really not quite the same.

Although most writers tend to prefer the morning for this period of intense focus, some find it very late at night after everyone has gone to bed. Kafka, Nabokov, and George Orwell wrote at night. (You can find more writing routines in Sarah Stodola’s brief but inspiring book, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Ars.)

No matter the time of day, however, the absence of distraction tends to be the thread that runs through the writing routines of many of the writers who are—or at least used to be—household names. “I write only about two hours every day because that’s all the energy I have,” Flannery O’Connor wrote, “but I don’t let anything interfere with those two hours, at the same time and the same place.” You can learn more about Flannery’s writing habits in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald.

Virginia Woolf 1902 Photo: George C. Beresford

In “The Vinyl Hour,” Andres talks about the importance of the concentrated, dedicated hour of listening as a way to truly appreciate vinyl. “That’s how you learn to hear dust. That’s how you can tell minor scuffs from serious scratches. That’s how you know when you need to recalibrate your turntable.”

There’s a metaphor here for writing, too, of course (we writers have a bad habit of finding metaphors for writing everywhere). Where’s the dust in your manuscript? What are the scuffs? What are the minor scratches? How closely can you read and listen to the words you put on the page when you do so in the quiet hour, with total concentration and attention?

I encourage you to find your hour this week, wherever it might be located in your day: early in the morning before the household wakes, late at night after the household goes to sleep, or maybe even midday on a park bench or an empty stairwell when your officemates are out to lunch. Find the quiet hour each day and listen to your writing voice².

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1. For some reason I am reminded, in this moment, of the lyrics to the gorgeous song “Love on Parole” by The Mendoza Line. In addition to being a great musician and lyricist who can pull off unexpected slant rhymes like longing/warning Timothy Bracy also happens to be a kind person who generously gave me permission to quote “Love on Parole” in both The Wonder Test and The Marriage Pact. Among the “Love on Parole” lyrics rattling around in my head are these:

The room readied itself for that transfer of power
When you rode right through in your penultimate hour

It’s a song about love, and it’s a song about fighting, where even a cup of tea becomes a battleground. The album 30 Year Low, which features “Love on Parole,” is an album that deserves to be listened to without distraction.

2. For more writing inspiration from the talented writers in my Writing for Substack class, read “The Curious Matter of Making Readers Cry,” by Brooke Lea Foster of Dear Fiction and "Searching for Our Voices" by Alexander Lowe McAdams of

A L M A • G E N E T R I X

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