Stealing Time to Write
No one tells you, early on when you think you want to be a writer, how hard you will probably have to fight to find time to write. As an adult, you probably have a job. Given the current economy, you might well have two. Add in any other responsibilities you may have, plus a possible desire to have a social life, and it's incredibly easy to find yourself with no creative juice left for writing at the end of the day.
How do you fix that? How do you steal time out of the rest of you life when you aren't absolutely exhausted or distracted or wishing you were listening to that new podcast you heard about the other day?
As with pretty much everything else in life, I don't think there's one single answer. What works for one person won't necessarily work for someone else, and what works for one period in your life might not work all the time. I encourage you to be as flexible and creative in how you approach making time to write as you do actually writing!
Some suggestions on ways to steal time for writing:
Get something to capture those shower thoughts. This can be hanging waterproof paper and writing utensil on the shower wall or turning on a recording device or making your significant other (or cat) sit on the toilet lid and take notes. Anything that allows you to put down whatever thoughts pounding water shakes loose. Move beyond winning arguments in your head, and turn your shower productive. (If you teach your cat to take dictation as a result of this tip, please just dedicate your inevitable memoir to me for giving you the idea. I'm not even asking for a cut of the profits.)
Keep a notebook with booklight by your bed. I don't know about anyone else, but I have a weird tendency to drift off to sleep fixing all my dialogue problems. Then I wake up in the morning with absolutely no memory of my brilliant edits, because I didn't write them down. Why didn't I write it down at the time? Usually because I don't want to turn on the bedside lamp and wake my partner. Slap a booklight on that notebook, and odds are good you can at least make yourself some quick notes.
Make sticky notes or a little notebook your friend. This probably sounds silly, but I've found it can be very helpful to have something handy to jot down the random ideas I have throughout the day. A small notebook or sticky notes can be slipped in a pocket, purse, or diaper bag for quick and easy access. If you're writing a story, it's very easy to shift scenes around if they're all on post-its and you're shuffling your story layout around. Bonus: Sticky notes come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and colors, so the possibilities for creating something visually as well as verbally engaging are practically endless.
Schedule your writing time, complete with reminders. If you are anything like me, you need reminders to keep yourself on track; otherwise, you're liable to forget that you need to take your allergy medicine before you got to bed or the chicken has to go in the crock pot for tonight's dinner. That need for reminders extends to writing as well. If I don't include writing time in my physical agenda and digital calendar, combined with an alarm to nudge me away from doomscrolling Twitter, I may well let the day carry me right past a good creative period. The schedule reminds me that what I'm doing isn't purely self-indulgent or selfish; it's actually every bit as important as the time I (too infrequently) get up early to work out or spend writing up a work proposal.
Set yourself aside 15 minutes a day where you just write. Allow yourself to step away from the rest of your life for 15 minutes. It doesn't even have to be 15 consecutive minutes -- if the best you can do is grab 5 minutes here and there, then do that. Pop on some headphones, set yourself a timer, and give yourself that creative space. If you have to combine it with self-care, aka shower time, then do that!
Remember that "writing" doesn't have to mean physically writing or typing, and find ways to accommodate that. Maybe you aren't in a position where you can take up a pen and paper or plop down at a laptop, or maybe those more traditional methods don't work for you. That doesn't mean you can't write; you just need to find methods that fit your needs. For some people, that may mean finding a speech-to-text app so you can talk your way through a story or article. For others, that could look more like sketching out a quick storyboard. We might not have the technology to think our stories into reality by connecting machines directly to our brains yet, but that doesn't mean we have to do it the exact same way it's always been done.
Grant yourself permission NOT to write. No one can be mentally "on" all the time. Everyone needs to recharge, mentally, physically, and emotionally. That means you aren't always going to make that word count goal or writing time goal you set for yourself. You have to find a way to make peace with that knowledge, because otherwise you send yourself in a gnarly little shame spiral and suddenly you aren't writing at all. It's OK not to make word count or not to finish that chapter you planned. Life is weird and hard, and it's OK not to write.
Lie and say you're using the bathroom, then sneak off to write in peace. I've been informed this only works for men, because neither cats nor children are deterred by a closed bathroom door when Mom is on the other side. Still, might be worth a shot.
What do you do to steal a few minutes out of your day for writing?
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