Life is busy, and writing is time-consuming. Unless you’re one of the very few people who make enough money to live solely off of publishing your books, you’re likely trying to fit in writing time among countless other commitments.
A lot of people will advise you to get up early in the morning. But if you’re taking care of kids, you’re already getting up super early, and anything more would mean you simply don’t sleep. Others will tell you to use your lunch break or time after you get home from work. But if you have a demanding job—and what jobs aren’t demanding?—a free hour where you aren’t trying to feed yourself or keep your home clean enough to live in is hard to come by.
So what are you supposed to actually do if you have a tight schedule and aspirations of finishing a novel? Just let the years pass and your dreams of writing stay in your head, never making it onto the page?
Be Practical
The first practical thing to consider when making writing fit into your busy life is to be honest: things are not ideal. If you wait around for the perfect circumstances to do anything, you’ll be waiting around a long time.
The most common problem for the average person is getting more than a few minutes here and there to write, at least on a regular basis. Even if you can take a couple of hours on Saturdays and Sundays, you might find that you spend the majority of that time simply trying to get back into the headspace of your characters, and you don’t really get much added to your word count.
So the practical, frustrating, but ultimately important first step is to take a few minutes every day, even if you can only take a few minutes. Maybe you write out some plot ideas on your phone for five minutes sitting in your car before you drive home. Maybe you get down a paragraph and then shut your laptop and get dinner on the table.
It won’t feel ideal, it might not even feel productive, but the pennies add up, and you’ll find that when you finally can get an hour to yourself, you’ll spend more of it typing than you did before.
Make Your Own Microwriter’s Retreat
Organized writing retreats are pretty great. You get to stay in a beautiful place with other writers, and you are fed and cared for while you only focus on your work. Depending on how much funding a program has, you might even get paid for your travel, maybe even your time taken off work!
But when it comes to practical thinking, you likely don’t have time to apply to writing retreats if you’re struggling to scrape together time to write. So make your own!
If you can’t afford or can’t organize an entire week off at a woodland resort, there are other ways to make a special occasion out of prioritizing your writing. You don’t even need to pay for a hotel room!
Can you turn your phone off and sign out of your email account for a weekend? Maybe even for one day? When is the next federal holiday you have off work? Can you turn off your internet and save your files to a local hard drive?
There’s a lot that’s bad about being constantly attached to the world via your phone and internet. But that also means it’s pretty simple to shut it off, literally. Every once in a while—and it’s OK if this only happens every once in a great while—become unreachable and get some words on the page.
Set Realistic Goals
It’s easy to be hard on yourself. That's true in almost any context, but it’s especially true for writers. Writing, especially for big projects like full-length books, is an immense amount of work. And if you’re fitting your writing in here and there, that makes the time stretch out even longer.
Setting and reaching goals is a great way to build momentum and self-esteem but only if those goals are realistic. Do you really think you have time to get in an entire first draft of your high-fantasy doorstopper in three months? Even full-time writers would struggle with that kind of deadline, and it would certainly be a rough rough draft.
But if you give yourself a realistic timeline, one you can actually reach, you’ll feel a lot more secure in your progress. If you don’t want to wait more than six months to reach a full deadline, you can make lots of smaller ones rather than a few big ones. That three months might be a good timeline to get through a certain big plot point. Break up your work into smaller chunks, and be kind to yourself when you set your deadlines.
We’re All in This Together
Hardly anyone makes their full living from writing alone. Even published authors—With multiple books! With names you recognize!—are either lucky enough to have a high-earning spouse or have some kind of day job.
So stop comparing yourself to Stephen King and instead of feeling down on yourself for not producing two thousand words a day, reach out to your writer friends and give each other credit for doing your best. You’ve got this!
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.
