How to Find the Time to Write
Prioritizing Your Writing
Do you show up to work everyday they expect you? Do you feed your children dinner every day, even when you don’t feel like it? Do you walk your dog every day? Do you sit down and write regularly? Do you have a writing scheduled? Do you show up to it every day, even when you don’t feel like it?
I strongly suspect that for the first three questions and other similar questions, the answer is yes. Of course you feed your kids and show up to work. But when I got to the writing tasks, things became more difficult. You suddenly become busy or don’t have any ideas. You really need to check your email and twitter several more times. Which leads to the simple question, how to find more time to write.
I suspect you probably have already figured out where I am going with this. You need to consider your priorities. But while saying that is easy, and something we already know, doing it is something different entirely. And that is where I’m going to help.
Create A Writing Plan
The first step is to come up with a reasonable scheduled. This isn’t the NanoRimo schedule, this is the easy one. If you wrote 300 words a day, you could write over 100,000 words in the next year. Take weekends off and you could write about 75,000 thousand. That is the novel you’ve been talking about writing, and I promise you can find time to write 300 words. And it’s not good enough to say you’re going to do it. Write up a contract and sign it, then get someone else to sign it as a witness. Make it feel official.
Once you have a scheduled, you need a plan. These are similar, but not the same thing. I’m going to write 300 words a day is a schedule. I’m going to eat at my lunch while writing or I’m going to get up a half hour early every day is a plan. The more specific the plan, the better. If possible, try to connect it to a habit you’re already doing every day. Once you’ve connected the two then you’re going to remember to write every time you do the other one.
Creating a Writing Habit
Now comes the part that if you do right can make this work. You want to create a carrot and a stick. Find something you enjoy that you can reward yourself with. Ideally, it will be something small that you do every time to help reinforce the habit and make the work seem pleasurable. Eat a candy-bar every day when you’re done. But it could be a longer term goal. Perhaps go out to eat if you’ve written every day for a week. Just as important is the stick. Ideally, you need some level of accountability for this and you need to commit. Find someone who you know will hold it to you and write them a check for a thousand dollars that they can cash if you don’t meet your goals. Make sure you commit to at least 30 days and preferably 90. If you can do it every day, you’ll be likely to keep doing it. Buy a calendar and mark off the days as you do it. It may seem stupid, but it helps.
Right now I suspect many people are digging deep into their bag of excuses. I work too much and have kids. My roommates are constantly interrupting me and I have writer’s block. They’re all absurd lies. If you had a flat tire on the way home from work, would you have time to fix it? Would your entire world collapse? And writing isn’t nearly as disruptive. I heard a story of one woman who wrote her novel on her phone while at red lights. If all you need is to get 300 words down, you can do it on the toilet, or email it to yourself when you check your emails at work.
Overcoming Writer’s Block
The writer’s block argument is even easier to dismantle. Have you forgotten how to type? No, then you can write three hundred words. If you don’t know what to write start typing, I don’t know what to write. Write “The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dog,” a few dozen times, or “All work and no Play makes Jack a Dull Boy”. It doesn’t matter because once you convince yourself that you’re going to write whether you have anything to say, you’ll find that most writer’s block is fear of writing something bad. If you don’t care if it’s bad, the writer’s block goes away and you get enough writing done to get better, or at least you have something to edit.
The last step to finding more time to write is to stop when you hit your goal. If you’re writing 300 words a day, don’t write 301 stop at three hundred. If it’s in the middle of a sentence that’s fine. It will make starting tomorrow a lot easier because all you have to do is finish the sentence. This along with keeping your goal small will make you look forward to writing. Once you’ve met your reasonable goal and written every day for at least thirty days, you can renegotiate your contract. You should try to keep your schedule as consistent as possible and don’t over promise. If you’re easily writing 300 words a day, then make it 400, but you’re not allowed to make it more than half again as much as you’ve been doing. You want it to be easy.
Conclusion
I honestly do not believe that writing advice is universal. Every rule needs to be broken to create art, and everyone is different. But this isn’t writing advice, and so is far more universal. It’s about creating the habit of writing and making it a priority. It’s about deciding that you want to write and don’t just want to have written.
