"Every spare second I would write, somehow. On my lunch hour, too"
About this Quote
Discipline is hiding in the plainness of this line. Kevin J. Anderson doesn’t romanticize writing as lightning-bolt inspiration; he frames it as something you smuggle into the cracks of a working life. “Every spare second” lands with a faint desperation, not tragic, but practical: if you’re serious, you don’t wait for the perfect afternoon or the cleared calendar. You steal time back.
The syntax does a lot of the work. “I would write, somehow” admits the chaos of real schedules while insisting on inevitability. “Somehow” is the quiet hinge between aspiration and craft: maybe it’s a notebook, a voice memo, a few paragraphs hammered out before the next meeting. It’s not a brand slogan; it’s the unglamorous logistics of persistence. Then the add-on: “On my lunch hour, too.” That “too” is revealing. Lunch is culturally coded as a break, a tiny humane pause in the day, and he’s casually confessing he spent even that on the page. The subtext isn’t martyrdom so much as priority-setting: writing isn’t what happens after life; it competes with life and wins, minute by minute.
Context matters because Anderson is known for high-output, commercial genre work. This is a craftsperson’s ethic, not a tortured-artist pose. It’s also an implicit rebuttal to a common excuse economy: the idea that creativity requires ideal conditions. His message is bluntly democratic and slightly intimidating: if the work matters, you make time. If you can’t, maybe you don’t want it badly enough.
The syntax does a lot of the work. “I would write, somehow” admits the chaos of real schedules while insisting on inevitability. “Somehow” is the quiet hinge between aspiration and craft: maybe it’s a notebook, a voice memo, a few paragraphs hammered out before the next meeting. It’s not a brand slogan; it’s the unglamorous logistics of persistence. Then the add-on: “On my lunch hour, too.” That “too” is revealing. Lunch is culturally coded as a break, a tiny humane pause in the day, and he’s casually confessing he spent even that on the page. The subtext isn’t martyrdom so much as priority-setting: writing isn’t what happens after life; it competes with life and wins, minute by minute.
Context matters because Anderson is known for high-output, commercial genre work. This is a craftsperson’s ethic, not a tortured-artist pose. It’s also an implicit rebuttal to a common excuse economy: the idea that creativity requires ideal conditions. His message is bluntly democratic and slightly intimidating: if the work matters, you make time. If you can’t, maybe you don’t want it badly enough.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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