Time to Write

“I just don’t have time to write.”

“I have so many things on my plate already, how can I find time for writing?”

“I have a job, a family, a household to take care off, I can’t possibly squeeze in writing.”

We’ve all heard or made these excuses. We’ve lamented that 24 hours in a day are not enough for all we have to do and that writing can’t possibly be added to all that. The must-dos on our list are killing our creativity, we cry.

Pardon my french, but that’s just bullshit.

You don’t have time to write because you’re not MAKING time to write. It’s that simple. Your commitment is in question. Writing is not one of your priorities.

T. S. Elliot, William Carlos Williams, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Bram Stoker, Wallace Stevens among many others wrote with full-time jobs. Many authors even nowadays write in the margins of a full-time life between their day jobs, kids activities, household duties, socializing, volunteering, being active members of their communities. They recognize that if they don’t make a conscious effort to carve time out for writing then it will be the first thing to go. It basically boils down to how important writing is to you.

In order to craft your writing relationship with time, here are some tips:

Plan Ahead
If you come to the page with your writing planned out then you will get more out of your time. Think ahead of what you want to be doing with your next time block. Work on plot holes? Character development? Tigtening the line lengths in your poem? What this mindset does is have you focused on what you need to be doing before you get to the blank page. Instead of wasting time with fragmented focus, you can attack the day’s work right off the bat. Productively.

The Right Task at the Right Time
We all have different biorhythms. Some of us perform better in the morning. Some at night. Some can write in crowded cafes, others need the hush of a library. However, not all of us get our ideal writing conditions. The trick to maximizing writing productivity is to do the difficult writing tasks at your peak performance hours and the tasks that feed your writing and may not need as much focused attention such as brainstorming or research perhaps in off-peak hours. Don’t waste peak writing time on tasks you could do outside of it.

Use Technology
Technology has reinvented our relationship with time. We no longer have to be tethered to our desks in order to write. As people who are always on the go, alternate methods of capturing ideas and being productive are readily available. For example, I have a friend who made progress on her novel by recording a little bit of her story everyday on a voice recorder during her hour-long drive to work. She would then transcribe it over the weekend. I myself have used the recording function on my smartphone to ‘talk’ out poems while cooking.

Waiting Time
We all get the same 24 hours. The idea is how creative we can be in finding time around the activities that make up our day. Some days can be so jam-packed with work, errands, life that one has to really scrounge for the minutes. Yes, we would like an uninterrupted chunk by the hour but hey, since we can’t have that, we’ll take the 10 minutes spent in the waiting room at the doctor’s. Or the 13 minutes 6 seconds spent waiting for our kid’s game to finish. And I hate to break it to you, but if the only time you get to yourself in the day is when you use the bathroom, then consider that writing time. When writing is priority, nothing is sacred.

Hour Early, Hour Later
So this is a fairly common way adopted by writers to maximize time. Depending on your peak hours you can either get up an hour earlier than your usual time or go to bed an hour later than your norm and use this time for writing. The advantage of this is that you get that uninterrupted hour before you launch into your day and it can contribute to your literary productivity. If an hour of sleeping time seems too much to sacrifice, you can start out with 15 minutes for a week, increasing another 15 minutes the next week and so on until you have brought yourself up to an hour.

I hope these tips help you. I’ll leave you with these lines:
“Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines…”
— Pink Floyd, Time.

Until next week!