For a mass of people who proclaim to love writing and want to dedicate our lives to it, isn’t it surprising how few of us can actually find the time to do it?
I’m guilty of it as much as anyone else. After threatening to write a novel for years, I still struggle to find that one hour in the day when I’ll have not only the uninterrupted time, but the energy and the clear head to actually care. It’s not the time that’s the problem, I’ve found, it’s that headspace. Every evening for the last three weeks, after we’ve put our son to bed, had dinner, and my husband has asked, “Are you working tonight?” I’ve answered, “No. Let’s watch 24 instead.”
That’s right. 24. I’ve seen all seasons before. But it’s gripping, it’s mindless, and we’ve had more than our fair share of stress lately, so we sit in bed for four hours each night watching episode after episode of the show. I don’t regret it because my husband and I both love Jack Bauer and find cuddling in bed watching crap TV a great way to spend time together, but that’s two, three, four hours every day that I could be working on my novel.
It’s not the time that’s the problem, it’s the energy. When writers ask, “how can I find the time to write?” what they’re really asking is, how can I, after all that I have going on during the day with my job and the stress and the kids and the never-ending nature of it all, sit down in silence and bring beautiful thoughts on to the page?
Well, you can’t.
Or at least I can’t. I used to yearn for those beautiful thoughts, those clear-headed stream-of-consciousness flashes of brilliance that I would bring on to the page, but instead I just bring me. Twisted, stressed, frantic, muddled up old me, and write from the place that is twisted, stressed, frantic, and muddled up.
Twisted, stressed, frantic, muddled up novels are better than perfectly-written beautiful stream-of-consciousness flashes of brilliance anyway, I’ve found, because they’re more real. They’re true. And let’s face it, they’re the only ones that get written. Because I don’t know about you, but I don’t know a single writer who has ever managed to take a flash of brilliance from her mind and successfully keep it brilliant on the page.
The novels in our heads are always going to be much more brilliant than the real novels we put out on paper. It took me three years to finally get that.
The same goes for your queries and your non-fiction books and your essays and your blog posts and anything else you aspire to write.
So how do you find the time in the day to write? You don’t. You pick a slot of time, any slot of time in which you know that you won’t be disturbed, and every day (or every weekday, if you’re like me), you sit there for that allotted period of time and you either write or you stare into space. Some days, you’ll fly. Some days you’ll find excuses. Some days, you’ll quit.
The excuses will come flying into your head much more quickly than the words for your book or your novel or your query letter or essay.
You need to research, the words are crap, you’re not ready for this, this is going to take so much longer than you’d planned for, you could be focusing on paying work instead of spitting out this garbage, you’re not good enough yet, maybe you should try a different novel, you’re better with nonfiction anyway, fiction is harder, querying is tough, she’s got more experience, easy for her to say as she’s got a high-earning spouse, the industry is dying anyway, this will never get published, you’re wasting your time, maybe you should research agents to see if this has any market, maybe you should read similar works to get an idea of how they’re handled, how about you write a synopsis or a query first, perhaps you should outline, it’ll never get published, is it time to go yet, you suck anyway.
The trick, if you can manage it, is to not quit. To sit through the resistance until it loses its power over you. For some people, that takes minutes. For some, it takes days or weeks. But you have to be determined to not quit. Because when you quit and walk away for a day, then two days, then three days, you stop coming to the page and you stop trying. It becomes harder to return.
But if you sit there and just be, regardless of whether or not you write, regardless of whether or not you’re tired, bored or frustrated, you create a block of time dedicated to this one thing that you want to do, whether it’s writing a novel or sending 30 queries, or working on your part-time freelancing career. You either do it or you sit there and be bored.
You arrive every day to this project, and sooner or later, the frustration of not writing will be bigger than the frustration of writing and you’ll be in a writing routine.
You’ll have found the time and more importantly, you’ll have created the headspace.
What is the one hour in the day that you can devote to your writing? Fix it today and you’ll have an instant writing routine.