Making the Time to Write

by K.M. Weiland @ Word Play

“‘It is only half an hour’-'it is only an afternoon’-'it is only an evening’-people say to me over and over again-but they don’t know that it is impossible to command oneself sometimes to any stipulated and set disposal of five minutes-or that the mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day. These are the penalties paid for writing books. Whoever is devoted to an Art must be content to deliver himself wholly up to it, and find his recompense in it. I am grieved if you suspect me of not wanting to see you, but I can’t help it.”

-Charles Dickens (writing to Maria Beadnell Winter, a childhood sweetheart, who wished to make an appointment with him)

How is it, I’d like to know, that Dickens can get away with saying something like that, and I can’t? Well, he is Dickens, I suppose. As a famous and beloved author, he could get away with being concise and even slightly snarky. Or could it be the other way around-that he was a famous and beloved author because he wrote just such notes?

One of the greatest struggles (yes, add another one to the list) of the writer’s life is making time to write. For some reason or another, most non-writers have a hard time fathoming that writing must be approached with the same dedication, discipline, and time management of a regular job. Family members and friends are likely to give us hurt and dirty looks when we sequester ourselves behind closed doors for yet another evening/night/morning/week of typing away. Add to that unfortunate guilt our own tendencies to procrastinate, and our already overloaded schedules often seem to have no place at all for our writing.

But guess what? If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. (Nope, sorry, staring out the kitchen window and daydreaming while you’re scrubbing dishes doesn’t count.) Anyone who has any intention of being taken seriously as an author has to first take himself seriously-and that means, first and foremost, making time to write.

You’ll note I didn’t title this post “Finding Time to Write.” I said “Making Time” for good reason. If you shove your writing onto the back of the shelf with the intention of getting around to it whenever a spare minute pops up, you’re likely to find an inch of dust gathered on top of your manuscript by the time you get back to it. Life will always get in the way.

You have to make time. You have to make your writing a priority. Don’t wait around for your family or your day job to slack off and provide the necessary schedule openings for you to grab an hour or two of writing every day. I will never forget a line of advice I was once read (although I have to admit I have forgotten who said it): Make time for your writing. If you don’t, nobody will.

In my own experience, scheduling writing time comes down to two hard and fast rules:

1. Be consistent. Make it a goal to write something six days a week. Set yourself a definite goal-either a word count or a time limit (word counts will make you more productive, but a time limit is often the only feasible option for busy schedules)-and stick to it every single day. Peter de Vries once commented, “I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.” The important thing at this stage isn’t the quality of what you write so much as that fact that you are writing. My own writing time runs from four o’clock in the afternoon to six o’clock five days a week.
2. Guard your chosen time zealously. I’ve been known to threaten interrupters with their choice of a machete or a flame thrower. Once I’m at my desk with my music turned up, I don’t stop for anything short of a natural disaster. I close the door, unplug my wireless card, and turn off the telephone. It’s taken years for family and friends to realize I don’t want to be interrupted during these two hours, and I’ll admit to having resorted to crankiness on an occasion or two. But it’s paid off. For the most part, I’m left in solitude. Instead of having someone derail my train of thought with the plea of a favor or a question that “will only take five minutes,” they’ve learned to hold off until I’ve emerged from my creative cell. Put your foot down, and eventually people will learn to respect your needs.

I’m blessed that my non-writing obligations are such that I can devote a relatively large chunk of time to my writing every day. Not everyone will be able to scrape together two free hours out of every day. (Although some will probably be able to find even more time than that.) Obviously, as important as your writing is, it isn’t the most important thing in your life. People and responsibilities do come first. But if you’re serious about your writing, you will have to make the time to write on a consistent and uninterrupted basis. Trust me, it’s worth whatever sacrifices you may have to make. And if you don’t want to take my word for it, then at least take Dickens’s.