Aspects of a Writer Project: The Writing Life Plan

Making Time, Spending Time

The most important thing to remember about making time to write is that you will ALWAYS be making time to write. The world is just not set up to give you a lot of time to write. Even full-time writers, who are extremely rare, have to make time to write. And writers who are early in their careers have to work even harder to make time to write. As novelist Rebecca Makkai likes to say, “all first novels were written under incredibly difficult conditions.”

The upshot of this is, if you wait for the perfect conditions to write, you may be waiting forever. You have to make that time yourself. Here are some suggestions.
  1. Get up early. If you can get up an hour or two before everyone else does, or before you have to get ready for work, you can devote that time to your passion: writing. My partner has done this his whole life; he loves being awake before other people. There have been times in my life when I have done it too, although it is not my preference.
  2. Stay up late. This was me before I had children and there are lots of writers who like to work this way. If you’re a night owl and can get some alone time at night, give it a try.
  3. Don’t go straight home after work. Stop at a coffee shop or your favorite writing spot and work for a couple of hours, then go home and relax for the rest of the night.
  4. Write on the weekends. There are some writers who do writing marathons on one or both days of the weekend and this might be you. Parking yourself in your favorite writing spot for four or five hours could work and ends up equaling getting up early for one hour ever day.

The important thing is to try different writing times until you find the one that works for you.

Some things to remember after you have carved out this time:
  1. Look for ways to motivate yourself. Make yourself some coffee or your favorite tea and only allow yourself to drink when you’re actually writing, for example.
  2. Don’t check your email or social media until you’re finished. The last thing you want to do if you’ve gone to the trouble of carving out this time is to fritter it away on the internet. In fact, if it helps, use this as your motivation, as in: I can’t check Twitter or TikTok after I’ve gotten up, not until I’ve written for at least an hour.
  3. Remember that small amounts of time add up. You can write a couple of pages in an hour. Two pages five days a week is 10 pages, 40 pages a month, 480 pages a year. Another benefit of smaller amounts of time is they often leave you hungry for more and ready to get back at the desk the next day. Too, even small amounts keep whatever you’re working on in the forefront of your mind where your subconscious will often keep working on it.
  4. Have a sense of what you want to do at the next writing session when you finish the current one. Finish in the middle of a sentence or when you know what’s coming next, as Ernest Hemingway did. Plan to re-read a page or two of the previous day’s writing to get back in the groove. Or, pull a prompt out of a book.
  5. Keep a list of writing ideas or things you want to write about for a current project, a commonplace book of sorts, either on paper or on your phone or computer, to catch your ideas so you don’t lose them and so you’re ready when you do carve out the time.

When you can’t write:

Sometimes, when something wonderful is happening (you just had a baby, your best friend is getting married, you just won the lottery) or something terrible is happening (a family member is very sick or dying, you lost your job, you just suffered a trauma), you might not be able to write. If that’s the case, you need to cut yourself some slack. You will get back to it. Just not right now.

When you think you can’t write but you really can:

If writing is your passion, finding time to do the writing will be a lifetime struggle, one way or another (unless you get a residency, which is paradise for a writer and something you should consider applying for). Not only do you need to make time for it, but you need to remember that, if you care about writing, there are lots of things writing needs to come before.

In Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (a classic you must read if you haven’t yet) Anne Lamott wrote that if you could just give up the 11 o’clock news, you could reclaim enough time for writing. But she was writing in the early 1990s, before the internet and digital media had saturated our lives. Now writing must not only come before the 10 o’clock news but also before social media and streaming tv, before binging Youtube and TikTok. It needs to come before even your favorite video game, before happy hour, before most parties and most lunches with friends, before most hobbies, and before surfing the internet and online shopping. There’s nothing wrong with these things individually, but really, they’re rewards for AFTER writing.

Finally, even though there are times when it can be hard, being a writer, someone who interprets the world through words, is a gift. Think of it this way when you’re rubbing sleep out of your eyes at 5 a.m. or trying to stay awake at 11 p.m. Not everyone gets to do this but you do. Enjoy it. This is what it’s all about. Your work. Your passion. A passion you share with Toni Morrison and Leo Tolstoy across the centuries—both of whom had to make time for writing.

Content by Stephanie Vanderslice

Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0


Return to "Sustaining a Writing Practice"

Go to Table of Contents page

This page has paths:

Contents of this path: