Post #145 November 19, 2018

“Facebook, YouTube and Emails, Oh My!  Finding the Time to Write”

I am currently in between writing projects.  Around Thanksgiving, I’m uploading the final title in my series The Farpool Stories.  In early February 2019, I’m uploading the first episode of my serialized 12-episode story called Time Jumpers.  I’ve done the first episode already and will start the second after Thanksgiving.

So I have a little time to relax and decompress. 

Which brings to mind a question every writer asks: how do you find time to write?  I want to address what works for me in this post.

Primarily, finding time to write is an issue of motivation.  What motivates you?  What gets you out of bed in the morning?  What keeps you up at night, mulling over possibilities and options?

I know a fellow named Tom.  He’s not a writer but he’s surely one of the busiest people I know.  Multi-tasking is his middle name.  He drives full time for Lyft.  He attends daily to a wife who has a serious disease.  He attends nearly daily to an aging father in declining health, now in a nursing home.  Oh, and he’s also president of our Sunday School class.  How does Tom even find time to breathe?

Here are my rules for being able to carve out time to do something like write.

1. Make it a daily thing.  Pick a time.  Stick with it.  Writing should be like exercising.  Even like flossing your teeth.  You do these things because you know you should and you like the results.  As a writer, I enjoy seeing the pages mount up.  I always print what I’ve written that day.  As the pile gets taller, I feel some pride and sense of accomplishment at seeing that.  I get a bit of a rush…by God, I’m a writer!  Here’s the proof!  But the most important thing is to pick a time and a place and stay with it.  Preferably every day.  Make it like brushing your teeth or showering.  If I don’t put down 3-5 pages a day (and I give myself plenty of time off as needed), I just don’t feel right.
2. Set a goal.  I’ve alluded to 3-5 pages a day for my own schedule.  That’s 15 to 20 pages a week.  Assuming a genre novel is around 200-250 pages, that means you can have the satisfaction of completing a draft in about 3 ½ months.  Does that mean the job is done?  No, of course not.  There’s still editing, re-writing, cleaning up the prose, marketing stuff, etc.  But it does mean you can bang out maybe 2+ books a year.  That’s a clearer path to success than waiting for the muse to strike.  Take my advice: don’t wait for the muse.  Blast ahead and put words down on paper.  Even if you have to edit them later.
3. Give yourself permission to slide a little but feel bad when you do so.  Glory in the guilt.  This may be controversial, but in my experience, we live in a feel-good time and if you have worked out a schedule and a discipline that works for you, and you don’t do it, you’ll feel bad when you’re not doing something writerly every day.  If and when that happens, you’ve climbed an important motivational hill.  You’ve made putting words so much a part of your daily living that you can’t envision a day when you’re not doing it.  I have become so good at motivating myself that occasionally, I find it hard to turn myself off.  That can be bad too because it can lead to burnout.  But remember: nobody’s making you do this.  You have to make yourself do it.  And one way to accomplish this, is to understand what motivates you to do something hard and isolating and not always initially rewarding.  Hopefully, the results later will be what motivates you but everyone is different.  Examine what works for you, set up a schedule and stick to it.
4. Keep a record and celebrate meeting your goals.  When I finished The Farpool: Union, I gave myself a few days off and then we went to the beach.  My kind of reward.  When your work is (finally) done, reward yourself.  Have lunch with friends.  Buy a bunch of books.  Go see a movie.  Hike in the mountains.  Whatever is rewarding.  And then get back to work.  In between works, I make myself spend a few hours in the office every day.  I might be developing outlines for a new story, developing character bios, researching or just day-dreaming.  But I always go back to my schedule and begin the process all over again.  And when I see the downloads mounting up my author’s dashboard on Smashwords, that’s pretty good motivation for me to continue, because it means somebody out there thinks enough of my work to download it.
    
   Finding time to write is really about knowing yourself, as (I believe) Socrates once said.  Writing is a solitary art.  Only you can motivate yourself.  Motivation theorists tell us that it’s the rewards at the end that provide a lot of motivation.  If you believe Maslow’s theories, then that puts writing somewhere around love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization. 
   That’s good enough for me.
    
   The next post to The Word Shed comes on November 26, 2018.  In this post, we’ll look at where writers get their crazy ideas.
    
   See you then,
   Phil B.