Ten Suggestions On Making Time To Write
Every writer I’ve ever spoken to—from hopeful to published—agonizes over writing time. There is never enough of it. That lack of time causes a helpless kind of frustration that leaves us feeling like if only—if only I had fewer obligations, fewer friends, fewer kids! Maybe then I’d have finished by now. Maybe then my book would be better. Anxiety builds. Resentment builds.
Yet even when there’s plenty of time—a full weekend, for example, when we’ve got no plans and it’s too cold to go outside anyway—that expanse can feel threatening. We put so much pressure on ourselves to produce work that is perfect because we may never have that chance again, so we hate ourselves when we can’t do it. It’s a lose-lose.
I bet it’s not just writers who feel this way, but anyone with a dream floating alongside their daily life. Always there, haunting, waiting. You want to pay your dream attention but you can’t because someone needs to cook and the house isn’t clean and you’ve got fifty errands to run and dinner plans and a full-time job. And also, you’re terrified to pay your dream attention because what if it turns out that time isn’t the issue? What if you just suck at it?
Okay, I’m projecting. Maybe you have never felt that way, but I have.
Making time—as opposed to finding time, which will never work—is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because I recently decided to go back to working full-time as a lawyer after five months during which my only job was to write my second novel. I made that decision for practical reasons. I wasn’t earning any money during my five months off, and I don’t know what the future holds, and I want my husband to feel free to pursue his own dreams, so when an opportunity presented itself, I took it. I did so knowing that I would be returning to agony of Never Enough Time.
I try to remind myself I’ve done this once before. I wrote THE LIFESTYLE while working in big law. Still, I feel like I’m asking myself the same questions—and punishing myself with the same self-criticisms—that I was in 2017 when I started trying to write a novel. So today, I forced myself to recall how I got it done, and how you can get it done, too. Maybe it’s writing you want, or maybe not. These suggestions, I hope, apply to any side hustle or hobby, whether it’s starting a business, working out regularly, making a film, starting a blog. Whatever your heart fancies.
Tell your friends and family.
When I started writing, I was too embarrassed to tell anyone. So when friends would ask me about my weekend plans, I’d lie and say I was tired or had to work. My friends thought I was lame, and I agonized over the tension between wanting to see them and have fun versus wanting to pursue my dreams. But the truth was, I preferred to write. I prefer to write over almost any activity. When I finally confessed what I was doing, it became so much easier to protect that time. I’m going to write on Saturday, I’d say, and they respected that. They’d be bad friends if they hadn’t.
Decide in advance what you’re willing to let go.
Time is finite. Unless you already have plenty of free time, which I did not, it is impossible according to the laws of physics to add an additional time-consuming commitment to your plate without letting something else go. Decide in advance what obligations you will release from your life. Otherwise, you will constantly feel torn between everything you want to do and have to do. It will be a cognitive dissonance with no resolution.
Among many other things, I’ve let go of: an active social life, keeping in touch with people as much as I should, trying to keep my home looking perfect, cooking anything but simple meals, and, frankly, cleaning. There is dog hair everywhere.
I allow myself four priorities: my job, writing, fertility treatments, and exercise. I am behind on errands and we barely have furniture in our house, let alone a single thing hung on the wall, but that was my choice, and there’s power in that. I don’t take on any other projects, as nice as they may sound.
View your time and money as an investment.
Your time is finite, and it is also a commodity. If you can spend the extra bucks on Instacart to save yourself a two hour trip to the grocery store (this is LA, there is traffic at 2 pm on Saturday), do it. That’s two hours to write. Same for spending money on a Catapult class or freelance editor. If you don’t view that money as an investment in your future, it will never feel worth it. But when you shift to that perspective, that money feels much more well-spent than if you’d bought YET ANOTHER EVERLANE SWEATSUIT LIKE I JUST DID.
Go to Airbnbs alone.
Rent an Airbnb for the weekend and write. But rent it somewhere populated. I once went to the woods alone and did not sleep for two days straight. The people who love you should support you in this.
You must want the process, not the result.
This one is critical. In the 20 Catapult classes I’ve taken, I’ve heard a lot of writers say they are afraid of wasting time working on a novel that never gets published. That’s the wrong way to look at it. You must enjoy the process of writing, of seeing what you can produce, of finding out where a character’s story ends, of getting better.
I have a friend who loves makeup, and spends hours every day watching makeup tutorials. I hate putting on makeup, but I do it because I’m too self-conscious to go without. I could never be a makeup artist because I don’t love the process. I only want the result. If you want to publish a book, you have to love the process—the equivalent of watching hours of makeup tutorials.
Write when the mood strikes.
Don’t tell my bosses, but I often write between 9 am and 7 pm when I should be working. But if I have an idea or my mind is flowing, I’m devoting that energy into writing no matter what time it is. I’ll make up my work later, whether it is late at night or on the weekend. If you try to compartmentalize your time, you will be forcing creativity when it feels unnatural, and then grow frustrated with yourself when you can’t produce. The trick is to remember that people are not thinking about you as much as you are thinking about you, so it’s likely your boss doesn’t even notice, as long as you get the work done.
Small increments matter.
There is a paragraph in THE LIFESTYLE that I remember writing at 10 pm in bed when I only had five minutes before my husband turned out the lights. Never say to yourself, I only have twenty minutes, so I won’t get anything done anyway. Not true. I actually find small increments are more productive because you’re putting less pressure on yourself to produce. If you’ve got twelve hours to write, you’re likely to procrastinate. If you just have twenty minutes, you dive in. It’s science.
You are a student and your subject is your craft.
You must be on a continuous journey of self-improvement. If you think you’ve got this writing thing nailed, then the investment in your practice won’t feel worth it.
Take classes.
Sign up for writing classes. Deadlines help you stay on track.
Moving backwards is moving forwards.
You’re going to set a lot of deadlines and miss them. You’re going to throw out a lot of crappy pages. You’re going to feel like you’ve accomplished nothing even though it’s been two years. But all writing-adjacent work is still work toward the end goal. Progress is measured not by the quantity of good words, but by the amount of effort you’ve put in. If you keep putting in effort, the writing will get better. The more time you spend working on a project, the more likely it is to get finished. If the words aren’t flowing one day, spend your time doing something adjacent to writing, like outlining, reading, or editing. I’m even considering writing this blog post a step in the right direction :)
These are the rules that I tell myself, but that doesn’t mean my agony days are over. I tell myself these rules because I’m still struggling, still wishing I had more time, still punishing myself for not accomplishing more. I’m even punishing myself for having spent over an hour writing this blog post when I could have been churning out pages. So I’m putting these rules out into the world so that I can support you, and you can support me, by reminding each other that we’re figuring out how to make time for what we love the best way we know how.