Free sample of How to Find Time to Be a Writer

Time. There’s never enough of the stuff. Days whizz by filled with stress and hectic life and emotions and work and feeding and shopping and cleaning and caring for others and commuting and a whole load of other things unique to our own situations. You want to write something substantial like a novel in amongst all of that, but it feels like an impossible dream, right? You’re barely holding things together, and it seems there’s no way to shoehorn in the extra hours you’d need to write 80,000 words. You should give up, right?

Wrong.

There is a way. In fact, there are lots of ways. Let’s explore the options in this book and see which ones suit your lifestyle the best. Let’s find you the time you need. Let’s work this problem until we solve it.

First, an assumption. I think you’re in full time employment. If you don’t work for a living then my guess is you don’t need this book. So you probably work, and that work takes your best hours from each day: let’s assume about eight hours plus getting ready for work, getting to and from your place of work, and some recovery time after each working day. It’s the single largest time commitment in your life, and you wish you could switch it for a life as a full time writer. The same could apply if you’re a student, giving your studies the long hours of attention they deserve. Or you could be in that category of person who has the most demanding and exhausting role of all: a carer for a relative or the parent of a young child or children. Your waking hours are sapped from you, and sometimes your sleeping hours too.

But you’re reading this because you want something to change. You want that sense of satisfaction that comes from writing. You want to achieve something amazing. You can and you will. But let’s just consider the matter of sleep. I once read a book about being a writer by an author who had some ideas with which I profoundly disagreed. On the issue of how to find time to write if you work for a living, his suggestion was simple: get up at four in the morning and write for three or four hours before getting ready to go to work. Yeah, right. I think that writing (and earning a living separate from writing) requires a certain clarity of mind. If I got up at four every day I would start to see things through a foggy blur that would prevent me from writing anything remotely coherent. Unless, of course, I went to sleep at eight the previous evening, and I think for most people that would be taking things too far.

So sleep is sacrosanct. A good night’s kip is essential for a clear-thinking mind. Caffeine can help in the short term, but it’s not a permanent solution to getting only twenty winks a night when forty winks is the amount recommended by medical professionals. Given that forty winks equates to eight hours in the sack (five winks is equal to an hour’s sleep, I think), that leaves sixteen hours in the day. If we accept that all great writers in history also slept for eight hours a day, then they also had sixteen hours of consciousness to work with each day. No matter how prodigious their literary output, no matter how great their talents, none of them had more waking hours in the day than you or I. All the great novelists, poets, playwrights and screenwriters had the same allocation of hours. Scientists, self-made billionaires, record-breaking sports people and professors – all have the same hours in the day as we do.

Some famous writers produce a body of work that seems like more than one lifetime’s output, but no one is born with novels under their belt. We all have to go through the slow and difficult process of learning to speak, learning to read, learning to write, and then learning to write good. I mean, write well. That’s a process that normally takes up the first twenty to thirty years of our lives. So the writer’s productive years begin at the same time as other things start to demand chunks of their day: the need to earn a living, the need to find a partner, and the need to bring up children. Finally, the need to keep all of those elements working in harmony always seems to consume every waking minute. With these daily pressures in life, how does anyone find the time to write?

The truth is that most people don’t find the time to write. And yet there are many hundreds of thousands who somehow, against the odds, manage to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. What’s the secret of these people? Do they somehow stretch the fabric of time to squeeze a few extra hours in the day? No. Do they possess self control and motivation at levels to which most people could never aspire? No.

Are they all anti-social misfits who refuse to spend time with their husbands, wives, children or friends? No. Well, maybe some are, but they’re in the minority.

I want to demonstrate to you that anyone can find time in their day to write. No matter what manner of maelstrom your life currently consists of, no matter how chaotic your home, no matter how pressured your job, it can be done. This book will show you how to get where you want to be, from a standing start to having a literary output equivalent to at least one novel, or screenplay, or play, or whatever your chosen art consists of, per year. You will be able to achieve this, I promise you. But it’s not an instant fix. Becoming a writer requires a delicate blend of time management, psychology, charity, sympathy, understanding and cups of tea. The mind is a powerful machine, but it doesn’t have a simple on-off switch. It takes time to prepare it for daily writing, to train it to accept writing as part of your routine, and ultimately to make it eager to propel your writing project forwards. If you follow the steps in this book in relation to your desire to be a writer you will reach a point in your life where not writing becomes uncomfortable, where you enjoy a natural high each day as a result of the words you write.