One of the things I hear most as a writer is the phrase, “I’d love to write a book one day, when I have the time.”
Here’s the thing. Nobody just has the time. You have to make it.
These days, I write almost full time – school hours, and whatever time I can scrounge back in the school holidays. But even now, I still have to adjust my schedule regularly for sick kids, can’t miss school assemblies, author events, and general life chaos.
When I started out, writing wasn’t my job. It was barely even a hobby. But once I decided I wanted to really make a go of becoming a published author, I had to find a way to fit it around a full time (plus!) job organising events all over the world, a lengthy commute, planning a wedding, and later having my first child.
Here are some of the things that helped me make it happen.
ONE
Make writing a priority. If you only take one tip from this blog, make it this one. Because if it’s not a priority, it’s not going to happen anyway.
Time management expert, Laura Vanderkam (whose books I recommend wholeheartedly), thinks that we should stop saying we don’t have time for things. We all have exactly the same amount of time – and in an emergency, we can make time for anything. If someone offered me a million pounds to knit bobble hats for cats, you can guarantee I would find time to knit. And learn to knit, actually.
When we say we don’t have time to write, what we mean is that it isn’t a priority for us. It’s not as important as watching TV, going out for dinner, or wasting time on social media. Or even, not as important as sleeping or going to work or caring for our children.
As you can see from the second examples above, writing probably isn’t a priority over everything in your life. And maybe in this season, you genuinely don’t have time to write. But stick with me, and you might find you have more time than you think.
The important thing is, if you want writing to happen, you have to make it a priority.
TWO
Evaluate your time. Where does your time go? Do you fall into bed wondering what on earth happened to the last twenty four hours? Well, there’s only one way to find out: track your time. Not forever, but at least for a few days, ideally a week. Just make a note every half hour or so, or when you stop one activity and start another, of what you’ve been doing. Even if some of the notes are emails/facebook/cooking kids tea/yelling at the cat. It’ll help you to figure out what it is that’s filling your hours.
Don’t have time to log your time? Well, it comes down to that priorities thing again. Do you want to find time to write more or less than you don’t want to log your time? If it’s more, then you’ll find thirty seconds every hour or so to make a note on your phone about what you’ve been up to. If it’s less… well, back to tip one with you.
At the end of your tracking, you should have a pretty good idea of where your time is going. Next, go through that log and put each entry into one of four categories:
1: Essential: these are the things that keep life going, like food and water, or that make it worth living, like quality time with your spouse etc. It’s the stuff that you can’t ignore, or that means most to you.
2: Boring but necessary: paying bills, food shopping, etc
3: Fun: your weekly salsa class, or a monthly book club, or playing board games with the kids.
4: Filling time: watching TV you don’t care about, checking your social media feeds for the second time in twenty minutes, flipping through a magazine filled with celebrities you hate. You know the sort of things. This category is for the stuff you hate yourself for doing even as you’re doing it.
Now you know where your time is going, it’s time to figure out where you can liberate some for writing.
Start with the ‘Filling Time’ category. Cut out an hour of TV watching, twice a week, and that’s two hours of writing time. Switch off notifications on your phone for twenty minutes and just write instead of scrolling.
If you can’t find what you need here, you’re going to have to dig deeper and maybe make harder choices. But you can make them. Work your way up each of the categories in reverse order and see what can be cut, trimmed or outsourced. Enlist a partner or kids to take on a household chore that takes an hour a week and use that time instead. Have food shopping delivered instead of going to the supermarket and free up an hour. Take your laptop with you to work and write in your car during your lunch break.
How many compromises you’re willing to make will depend how much you want that time to write. There are no right answers here – only the right choices for your life. And any extra writing time at all – even twenty minutes a week, is more than you had before, right?
THREE
Don’t underestimate small pockets of time. Even if you only found a small amount of time, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth using. Sometimes, it feels like if we can’t find a whole morning or weekend to write, it’s hardly worth bothering. But actually, it’s possible to be just as productive – if not more so – in small amounts of time, used regularly.
When I was working full time, I would get up half an hour early and write. I’m rubbish in the evenings, so I knew that if I was going to fit it in, it would have to be first thing. By the time I’d grabbed a cup of tea and sat down at my desk I had maybe twenty minutes a day to write, five days a week. At 500 words in twenty minutes, I could write 2,500 words a week. In thirty weeks – just over half a year – I could have a finished first draft. All in twenty minutes a day, five days a week.
Maybe you can’t get up earlier than your children do (trust me, I understand). But is there ten minutes every evening after they’re in bed but before you are? Or a twenty minute slot during their nap? What about your commute? Can you leave for work fifteen minutes early and write in the car before you go into the office? Or while your kid does their ballet class?
It doesn’t have to be long, and it doesn’t have to be every day. The key is to get into the habit of looking for small pockets of free time and use them to write. Even if it’s just on the notes app on your phone, or longhand in the back of your diary. All words count.
FOUR
Plan it in – and have a plan for it. Once you have your time to write, guard it with your life. It’s so easy for ‘free’ time to get sucked up and spent on nothing at all. So make it clear that this isn’t free time – it’s writing time.
The best way I’ve found to do this is to mark it out on my schedule – on the family calendar, paper or online, in your planner, wherever works for you. Treat it like an appointment you can’t afford to miss.
And like any appointment, prepare for it. Get ready early so you’re sitting at your keyboard the moment your time starts.
More than that, I find it helps to have a plan for the writing I want to do in that time, too. When my time is limited, it really helps to have an idea of the scene I want to write, or the plotting I want to do for a new book, or which chapters I need to edit. It means I sit down with the right documents or supplies, and I don’t waste time deciding where to start.
FIVE
Try timed writing. Another way I’ve found to really focus my mind is to set a timer for my writing. Sometimes it’s ten minutes, sometimes it’s half an hour, but knowing I only have to write until the timer goes off helps me to get started, somehow. And I’m always amazed at how much more I can achieve in a short, focussed time slot than in hours of procrastinating and dabbling. And those ten minutes really add up if I do them several times a day.
If you really can’t find much time to write, this will at least help you make the most of what you do have – and maybe you’ll find you don’t need more time at all!
(I use the Forest App for this, because I like seeing the little trees grow.)
SIX
Make it fun. Those little trees remind me of my last tip. Writing should be fun. Maybe not always, but at least most of the time. We do it because we love stories and we want to tell them. If the story you’re telling isn’t fun for you, then why are you telling it?
It’s a lot easier to find the time to sit down and write a story you’re excited to tell, than to force yourself to sit down at the keyboard for one that leaves you cold. So find a way to make your story fun. Make yourself a soundtrack that fits your book, so you’re instantly in story world the moment it starts playing. Daydream about the fun scene you’re going to write next so that when you hit your writing time it’s already bubbling around in your brain. Enjoy the process – because otherwise, you won’t make time for it.
0 Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks