Writer's Ramble: Making Time for Writing

 

This year at the Life, the Universe, and Everything symposium I had the chance to attend a kaffeeklatsch with Larry Corriea.  If you don’t know what that is, it’s a chance to sit down with an author in a small group and talk shop.  It’s a great opportunity to get to know a published author personally, and to ask questions.

One of the questions that I asked was, how do you balance your time and find time to write?  Larry’s answer was very reassuring to me, because he didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know. 

So, how do you make time to write?  Let me share with you what three things that have worked for me.

Find a time when you can write, uninterrupted

I’m an evening person, and I only need about 7 hours of sleep a night.  I put all my kids to bed by 9:30, so that gives me at least two and a half hours per night to write.  I’m not able to write every night.  Some nights I have less time and some nights I have more time.  But this is my time.

I find that I cannot write when other people are in the room, staring over my shoulder.  It’s too distracting.  I can’t write when someone has the TV on, or when someone is talking on the telephone in the same room, or when there is music in the background, or when a child is crying (which happens a lot in a family of five kids).

Night time is my time.  All the kids are in bed.  All the chores are done (most of them, at least).  My wife is in the other room with a mug of coco and Dr. Who on Netflix.  Now I can write.

So, are you a morning person or a night person?  Can you find space in your day when nobody is bothering you?  Can you find a place in your home free of distractions?

Make it a priority

Writing is going to be incompatible with your life.  Your biggest conflict will come from the people closest to you.  Your spouse.  Your children.  The friends that you hang out with.  Your parents, and your brothers and sisters. 

If you are married, or you have a serious someone in your life, you need to talk to them about your writing.  You need to let them know that writing is important to you.  You need to ask for their support.  This will mean hours of your time every day or so when you are NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO THEM. 

If you are a woman, you will struggle with the demands of being a mother, and you will be haunted with guilt that you should be paying attention to your children (particularly if you have young children).  And you will wrestle with guilt that you're neglecting the housework or your family.

My wife decided recently that she wanted to write.  In order to free up some of her time, we decided to put our youngest daughter into preschool.  This gave her three hours a day, for three days out of the week.  It made a huge difference.

The daily grind is always going to be there.  If you want to write, you’re going to have to make time for it.  You're going to have to tell yourself that your writing is important, and that for a few hours a day it has higher priority than anything else.  I think of my writing as work.  It's not a hobby and it's not some idle thing that I do to slack off.

Discipline yourself to do it.

When it comes to writing, you are going to be your own worst enemy.  You’ve blocked out the time, you’ve found a place where you aren’t going to be distracted.  You’ve gotten your spouse to run interference for you and keep the kids off your back.

And you spend the whole time on Facebook, or playing solitaire, or watching cat videos on You-Tube.

Some days you’re just not going to be in the mood.  Some days that X-Box calls to you like the siren’s song.  Sometimes you’d rather be out mountain-biking, or reading e-mail, or baking, or just getting out of the house.

I can’t count how many times I’ve sat down to write and I ended up playing video games or watching Netflix, instead. 

Sigh.

On the weekends I find it best if I take my laptop home from work and write on that, instead of using the workstation in my office.  I have too many distractions on my home PC, but the laptop only has work-stuff on it.  I can take the laptop and camp out in my dining room all day.  I’m alone, because if I see one of my children rummaging for food in the kitchen I give them a chore to do (If I let them, they’d spend the entire day eating and leaving a mess everywhere).  It works really well.

You need to motivate yourself.  You need to put your butt in your chair, and do it.  You need to resist all that other fun stuff.  Writing is hard to do.

Is this really what you want to do?

A few years back I decided that I wanted to be in a quartet.  I have a pretty good voice, and I was interested in singing.  I got a group of guys together and we practiced a few songs.  It was all religious stuff, and we sang on Sundays in front of our congregation.  We got lots of compliments.  We were good. 

And then I stopped doing it.

Why?  Well, honestly, you’ve only got so much time and you simply can’t do it all.  It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it.  It wasn’t that I wasn’t good at it.  It just didn’t fit into my life, so it had to go.

I can name a host of other talents that I’ve had to let go of, for similar reasons.  I haven’t picked up a guitar in 4 years.  I used to draw, but I gave that up, too.  I used to program video games, but not any more.  I can probably name five other things that I would dearly love to get into, but I never will.

Is it bad that I have all these talents, and they’re going to waste?  Certainly not.

My rambling has a point: writing is something that you choose to do.  Whether or not it’s something that YOU do is up to you.