Probably the most common excuse (yes, I’m being harsh and saying it’s an excuse) for why people don’t start writing is that they can’t find the time.
Newsflash: you will never find time. Ever.
Something will always come up to derail your best intentions. You might plan to spend time at your computer in the evening, but then you get stuck at work, your journey home is delayed or your child needs urgent help with their homework. There went the thirty minutes you’d set aside and once you’ve missed a session it’s harder to keep up the momentum.
Instead the key word here is to make time any way that you can.
At the moment the Bestseller Experiment is running a challenge to write 200 words a day (as on 25 January 2020). Every day. Now that may sound like a lot, but you’d be surprised by how quickly you can do that.
If you want to get started, consider the following:
Look for the unscheduled opportunities that arise during your day
Do you find yourself sitting around waiting for your kids at their swimming lesson or encounter a delay on the bus or train getting to or from work? Always have your writing tools to hand – whether that’s a notebook and pen or an app on your phone – and you can get scribbling. You may only have ten or twenty minutes but you’ll be surprised how much you can get done. You could also earmark some or all of your lunch break to sit down and write, whether that’s in a local coffee shop or another space you can find. Decide where you’re going to go so that you don’t have to wander around finding somewhere to sit.
Switch off social media
Yes, I’m now getting really cruel, but if you don’t have social media on your phone or tablet, you’ll not find yourself getting sucked into fifteen minutes of mindlessly scrolling through Twitter or Facebook, for example. Instead, you can open up that notebook app and spend 15 minutes writing something on there. Try writing the next section or scene of your book in 280 character sentences/paragraphs to get your tweeting fix.
Cut back on your television time
Ask yourself whether watching TV for half an hour or spending that time writing will help get your project done. It’s a case of priorities. If you’re only going to write 200 words, you can easily do that. Record the programme (almost everyone has the facility to do that these days) or pick it up through on demand TV and watching it can be your reward for writing. Either way, getting words on the page is the aim of the game.
Delegate the chores
If you have older children and/or a spouse/partner at home, make use of them in making sure the chores get done. See how much you can write while the dishwasher is being loaded or the bedrooms hoovered. My luxury to allow myself extra time to write is to pay a cleaner for a couple of hours a fortnight. While she’s cleaning, I’m tied to my writing desk for three hours and you won’t be surprised by how much you can achieve. Also, I don’t have to spend much time in the next two weeks cleaning.
Take a writing retreat
This one conjures up the image of going off to a countryside hideaway where you write for hours and someone makes all your meals for you. Sadly this isn’t practical for many people and can be expensive. If you can manage it, a retreat like that is a fabulous experience but there are ways to do this more cheaply. You could take a one-day retreat; Urban Writers is great if you live in or near London or Newcastle (the cost of the day includes a sandwich lunch which they fetch for you and there’s tea and coffee on tap) or you could rent a desk in a local co-working space. If you can’t spare the cash for something like this – and let’s face it, these places aren’t always cheap – you can do it at home (if you can manage to get the house to yourself for a day). You can get a few ideas from my blog post on this. I originally timed it over a week, but it can easily be stripped back to a day if that’s more practical.
Once you’ve made time to write, you can start getting down to the business of planning and writing your story. If you want some help with planning you can find out more on my blog post, which will help you to plan a mystery novel in a week.
Try some of these tricks for a couple of weeks and see if it doesn’t help you get started on that idea you’ve had banging around in your head for months. Let me know how you get on.
Do you have any tricks you use to buy yourself some writing time? Tell me in the comments below.
(This is a updated version of a previous post)