Space, Time and Other Minor Details

So you want to be a writer. You’ve got a stupendous idea for a book. Maybe you’ve even jotted down some ideas, a scene or two, some character names. There’s just one teensy problem. Although your story is constantly nudging around in your mind, you never have time to sit down and WRITE. After a day of carpools, email, meetings, phone calls, housework and a thousand other tasks, you’re toast.
 
Ever start a comprehensive new exercise regimen and find yourself dumping it after a week? Decide to lose twenty pounds on an all-grapefruit diet? Odds are the only thing you lost was any desire to eat another grapefruit. These endeavors fail for one simple reason: they are too ambitious. We bite off more than we can chew. We try to do too much, too soon. Then when we are forced to skip a day, or we have to attend the Little League banquet and there’s cake, we decide we’ve failed and we scrap the entire enterprise.
 
My solution: reject the all-or-nothing mentality that the writing gurus keep shoveling as the only way to be a writer. You need to STOP. Breathe. There’s a better, more realistic way. Here are six easy steps to taking your nutso life and adding in the one element that missing and that, ironically, you most want to have in there: the time to write.

1. Purchase a big calendar with a big square for each day, or even an entire page per day. Lines really help. This should be separate from the color-coded family calendar, but you’ll be including anything from that one in your personal day calendar as well.
2. Sit down and look at one week at a time. Just deal with next week for now. If that’s still too overwhelming, then only take on the next three days.
3. Fill in as many details about your current commitments as you can. Include time needed to start dinner, pick up the kids, return phone calls, take a shower....get the idea? If your calendar doesn’t have space for a full day’s list of activities, then buy a bigger one.
4. Now take a deep breath and analyze your week. Your goal is to find THREE BLOCKS of time for writing. Sixty to ninety minutes is ideal, but even thirty minutes isn’t too shabby. Here’s the secret: your writing times don’t have to be the same time each day, or even on consecutive days. What they do have to be is YOURS. Once you carve out three time blocks for writing, you write them in with the brightest colored felt tip you can find.
5. And then you write. Period. Treat those blocks as if you were behind the wheel of your car. Would you answer the phone while you were driving? The door? Start a load of laundry? Get caught up on Facebook? You would not.  Those time blocks are for writing and nothing else.
6. Can’t find any time blocks? Look again. Does your activity list include anything you can cut, such as catching up on the soaps, or spending unnecessary time on tasks or errands that could be combined with other trips? This scheduling step is vital; your future as a writer begins here. The word carve carries certain implications, and I don’t think I need to spell them out. 

 
It takes practice to tune out everything else during writing time, but it’s a habit worth cultivating. If you backslide and take a call, or maybe run downstairs to check on the meatloaf, don’t beat yourself up. Remember that this is a journey without a finish line.
 
And there you have it. Each week you’ll take a few minutes to analyze your time and carve out your writing life. If you only get two sessions in a week, take them and run. Maybe you can get four sessions the next. Just keep your goals realistic.

What, you may well ask, can you possibly accomplish in 15 minutes? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Remember that no one sits down and produces a polished chapter in one sitting, or maybe even three. In future blogs we’ll be chatting about breaking down various aspects of the process to preserve sanity. For now, just focus on finding those precious minutes and getting words on the page, even if they’re not your very best. Because whatever else they may be, they are YOURS.

---