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From the Archives
Wordy Wednesday–On Finding the Time
It’s possibly the biggest obstacle to following your dreams of writing that novel, or submitting that article, or working on your dream of writing poetry: “I don’t have the time.”
“Maybe after I’m retired.”
“Maybe after the kids are all in school.”
“Maybe when I’m finished with my degree.”
“Maybe…..”
The problem with maybes is that they are just another form of excuses, wrapped up in the guise of rationality and reality. No one has the time for writing. No one. Writing is like anything else that’s worthwhile; you must make the time to do it.
Stephen King certainly didn’t have the time to write when he was starting out. He wrote in the laundry room of the trailer he and his wife lived in while working at a laundry and finishing his degree. He snuck in minutes and hours to write even though he was dead tired. He made it work.
J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book by letting her infant daughter fall asleep in the stroller during a walk and quickly ducking into a coffee shop to scribble as much as she could before the baby woke.
Steve could have easily said “forget it—I want to relax!” Jo Rowling had every right to say “I haven’t slept in a week–I’m going home to take a nap while she sleeps!” But they didn’t. They sat, and they wrote, because they had to—because something inside burned more fiercely than the need for sleep, or free time, or whatever else they could have been doing at the time.
When you want to write, you make the time.
Michigan-based novelist Loren D. Estleman wrote a book a while back titled Writing the Popular Novel
“…hours are made of minutes strung together, and in the end no one can tell if they came all in a lump or piece by piece over the course of a year.”
I had this taped above my computer for a long time, and it still runs through my head when I start whining that I don’t have time to write something I’ve been meaning to write. No one is saying that you have to block off four hours a day in which to write—I can’t think of anyone who can manage that. But can you devote fifteen minutes to it? Can you give it a half hour while you’re eating lunch at your desk? Can you scribble that novel out in longhand while you wait for the kids to finish up with hockey practice or ballet rehearsal? Can you get up a half-hour earlier? Can you go to sleep a half-hour later?
If the answer is no, then you don’t really want to write. It’s that simple.
So, what are you going to do, today, to work toward getting started on that novel/poem/article/book proposal? You can do it. If someone like me, who has very little willpower and zero time to go to the bathroom let alone write articles/blogs/books can manage to fit it in, you can, too. I know you can.