Finding The Time

One of the hardest things I find while working full time in accounting with an hour drive commute is finding the time to sit down and get quality time to write. I mean I wake up early drive to work for 8 hours then get home as the sun is setting. Exhausted and brain fried I just want to fall on to the nearest comfortable spot and sleep as soon as I get a hot meal in me. But being realistic with my goals in life, to become a writer/maybe lit agent, it means that I have to actually write.

That's what it means to be a writer right? You write. And no one else is going to do it for you. So you have to find the time. No matter how short or long you have, you have to put something on paper. So that's what I do.

After I get home and do whatever needs to be done around the house, I sit down with my hand edited notes, I'd done on my lunch break that has a crewed over time and type them up. Let it be an hour or what not as long as I have something fixed something I feel like I had accomplished my goal. Though all be it I don't always get as much done as I'd like, but as long as I'm moving forward to being able to have a clean enough draft to send out to agents, that's all that matters.

It's all about making progress. No matter how small. You gotta sit down and get it done. Every free moment I have, which isn't much, I try to get something written or edited. Let it be for TALImag or for my own novels. There is no other way to have a finished article or book to be finished. It will take longer than one might like, especially if your focus isn't on your side, but you have to push through it. Muse or focus be damned. You have to push through all that and get down to work.

As much as some people think that you should only write if the muse or inspiration is on your side, that is a load of you know what. Yes writing with your muse or when extremely inspired is an amazing feeling, but it wont work if you want to be prolific and have a nice long career as a writer. Yes, I know I'm not a full time author and haven't been published, but I've watched , read blogs and tweets, from authors that are and have been told/read a lot of different advice over the years, but one thing has really stuck with me. Writing is a job. It's also a business. If you want to stay in it you have to learn sans muse and sans inspiration. If you have a story start working on it. Get something down. Every day. You won't meet deadlines if you only write when your muse wants to. And I'm not sure about you but my muse sure as hell doesn't work on my time table. She works on her own. Usually when I'm busy doing other things. Like driving or at my day job. All times when I can't write. And if you're a newbie to the writing world and get that chance to get published you don't want to start your career with the publishing world as the person who doesn't meet there dead lines. Don't piss off the people who give you the chance to show your work to the rest of the world.

Set your own deadlines and stick to them. Let it be sitting down for an hour and not stopping to go on the internet or walk away from your writing. Or let it be a page count, sentence count, or paragraph count. Set your goals and deadlines and stick to them.

Personally I try not to set such specific deadlines cause I start to dwell on them and the rest of the world end up demanding my attention. Attention that has to be given. So I set myself the goal of getting at least one paragraph done a day. More times than not I can get this done in five minutes. Sweet goal accomplished. I now have time to update a blog, twitter or TALI articles. Or like most times I can get a few more paragraphs done which turns into pages.

That is my goals during the week when I don't have all the time in the world. Weekends are a different matter. This is the time that I can really spend hours at my computer contemplating changes I might want to make to the plot. This is the time that I raise my paragraph count to a page count or depending on what else is going on around me to chapter count. If I can get a few pages done I'm ecstatic. If I can get more than one chapter done. I feel like I've accomplished something that doesn't happen ofter.

You just have to find that little bit of time to block out the rest of the world and dive into another one. 5 minutes for a paragraph or two hours. Just as long as you don't stay ital.

I know it's overwhelming when you sit down and look at everything that needs to be done. Looking at the whole picture is scary as hell. Finding the time to balance a full time job, writing, friends, family, every day house work. Some times you don't think you can do it all. But you can. Just shuffle things around and prioritize. All you need is that little bit of me time to get that one small goal done for the day.

You can do it. Iam. It's a struggle, but I'm doing it. And if I can do it. Well why can't you.

Just remember to being a writer means you have to write. Saying that you're a writer doesn't make you one. Putting a pen to paper or fingers to keyboard makes you a writer. Even if you can only fit in a sentence a day. It still counts.