A journalist once asked Margaret Atwood how much time she spent in her study.  “I’m here from 10:00 to 5:00,” she said.

“Oh, so you put in a seven-hour day.”

“No, no,” said Atwood.  “But if I have something to say, I’m there already.”

Method in writing depends on just such pre-arrangements.  I tell my students at the Writing Center in northern New Jersey to plan on sitting down in front of a computer, without distractions, for at least 15 minutes every other day.  Why every other day?  Because, while we all create three kinds of memory–short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term–writing only makes use of two.

The first, long-term memory, is like a hard drive on a computer.  The info is permanent—the street you grew up on, your first kiss, the smell of Grandma’s kitchen.  It’s stored in the brain in strands of protein held together by triple-valence electrical charges, which are very durable:  Such memories are the last ones to go in people.

The second, short-term memory, is like random-access memory on a computer.  It’s the scaffolding that surrounds a piece of writing during its creation–all the possible connections among words, feelings, images, and emotions that make it up.  These are also stored in the brain in strands of protein, but they’re much more temporary.  They’re held together by single-valence electrical charges. . .and they degrade completely, give or take, in 48 hours unless they’re refreshed.

So if you return to what you’re writing at least every two days, you will always have more than you left:  You’ll be able to resume the work, percolating in the back of your mind, just where you left it, and, as Robert Frost put it, “The wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing.”  But if you let more than two days go by, it can be like rubbing two sticks together to make fire.