We All Have 24 Hours in Each Day...
One of the questions I hear a lot is about finding the time to write. My process has varied over the past 25 years. During my undergrad years, I’d write in the evenings. When I started working for the State, I wrote during my lunch hour each day, along with whatever I could squeeze in during evenings and weekends. When Amy was sick, I basically stopped writing for close to a year.
I usually say it’s about priorities and choices. We all have 24 hours in a day. It’s up to us to choose how to use them.
That doesn’t mean we all have the same opportunity to write, or that we could all write three books a year if we just made the “right” choices and set better priorities, because some of those priorities are pretty much non-negotiable.
Let’s say, for instance, you’re a full-time single parent. You’ve going to have a baseline minimum amount of time each day that you’re taking care of the kid(s), keeping the house from getting too gross, running errands, and so on.
Or maybe you have a chronic illness or disability. That could mean you have to spend a certain amount of time on self-care just in order to function for the rest of your day.
Do you have a full-time job? Multiple jobs? Do you have your own car, or are you taking public transportation (which may or may not be conducive to writing) every day? Are you the primary caretaker for a parent or other aging relative?
In other words, yes, we all have 24 hours a day to work with. But we don’t all have the same flexibility in how we use those 24 hours.
Making time to write is still a choice. Maybe all you can manage is a couple of 30-minute stints each week. Maybe you have a spouse with a great full-time job, freeing up at least 8 hours a day (theoretically) for you to write.
I’ve been struggling more for the past two years, and I get frustrated because I don’t feel like I’m making as much time to write as I used to. But I don’t have the same flexibility I used to have, either. I have to remember it’s not fair to compare myself and my productivity to that of other writers, all of whom have different demands on their time.
It’s not even fair to compare myself to the me of three years ago.
So I make the best choices I can, the same as always. I try to prioritize, which means some things just don’t get done. That’s the main reason blogging has been so sparse for a while, compared to pre-2019 levels.
Decide what’s important, and do the best you can. And you know what? Self-care is important too. Down time is important. Time spent with friends and family is important. Taking the afternoon to go see The Suicide Squad with friends isn’t a betrayal of your writing dreams.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, and having done dishes and finished a load of laundry and cleaned up the dog’s bloody wart and tracked down that thing my daughter wanted for her apartment, I’m going to go see if I can finish another scene on the Project K rewrite.