Full disclosure: I have two jobs. In addition to working full-time, I often freelance as an editor and proofreader. All told, during the average week, I might work between fifty and sixty-five hours.
While that means my wallet gets fatter, it has the unpleasant effect of making me unable to write as much as I’d like to. If I don’t force myself to write, it doesn’t happen, just because of a sheer lack of time.
I don’t think I’m all that unique in this capacity—pick up almost any book or magazine about the writing life, and you’ll find scads of sob stories: This person has a hard time writing when his kids are home. That one has too much laundry to finish. And this one here had to clean out everything in her closet and vacuum her walls.
The fact is, no one is ever successful at writing unless they actually make time to write. A lot. So I’ve gathered this list of things that I do to make sure my writing output is high every day.
- Wake up writing. Start each day by getting up early. (Leo from Zen Habits wrote a great article about how to do this painlessly. Read it.) Once you’re out of bed, make yourself write five pages before you do anything. No e-mail, no breakfast, no shower. . . just you and your five pages. (Okay. . . maybe you can have a quick trip to the restroom first. Maybe.) I do this daily; almost all my journaling happens between when I wake up and when I start my daily routine (shower, coffee, dog-walking, and outfit coordination).
- Stop trying to make a finished product right away. Greil Marcus, wrote the following in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dungabout the habits of one of my favorite writers, Lester Bangs:
Assigned a 750-word record review, he would sit down at the typewriter and work through the night, through the next day, until he had thousands and thousands of words that he never dared show his editors…
If you’re prolific like Bangs was, you’ll likely write a fair amount of drivel. However, he recognized that he could maximize the amount of decent writing that he could do by writing a whole bunch, and then culling the good stuff. Editing is helpful, but you can’t do it until you have a draft. So start drafting.
- Abandon structure. Sometimes I get completely inspired and can’t get the ideas down fast enough—and then the prose that I usually feel amazing about degenerates into lists, keywords and phrases with little or no punctuation, spelling errors, and misplaced modifiers galore (yuck!). However, I have to remind myself that I don’t write for finished products right away. And neither should you. We use the phrase “writing process” for a reason—because making any kind of art is process-oriented. There are an infinite number of steps before you get to the finished product. So take it easy on the perfectionism and just get the words down.
- Stop hitting the damn “delete” key. If there’s one perpetual time-waster that I engage in when writing, it’s self-editing before I’m actually ready to. I really wish someone would invent a word processing program that makes it impossible to use the delete key. ( If anyone knows of something like this, I’d love for you to point me in that direction!) The best way I’ve found to deal with this when typing is to change my font to a color or style that physically pains me to see—so I stop looking at it until I’m done writing. When I’m ready to edit, I switch from neon yellow Comic Sans back to my normal dark Helvetica. (Curiously, self-editing isn’t a problem for me when I’m writing in longhand. I’m not really sure why.)
- Change up how you’re writing. A little-known fact about me: all my blog posts begin in lo-fi format—either in paragraph form in my handwritten journal, or mapped (and sometimes color-coded!) on grid paper. However, when I feel a mental block, I switch from handwriting to typing. I also have a complete inability to write solely at a desk; if I do it for too long, I start getting restless. When that happens, I switch from a full-size notebook in longhand at the desk to writing in a small reporter-size notebook on the subway platform or under my desk at a freelance job. And speaking of jobs. . .
- Fit it in wherever you can. Write three sentences between stops on the subway. Stay at your desk during lunch and churn out a couple of pages. When your coffee date is running late, pull out your paper and pen and get a few words down. Whenever you find yourself wasting time, stop. Write instead.
- Give yourself a word count or a time limit. Back when I first decided I was going to be a writer my first ongoing work came in the form of assignments from my college newspaper. It was easy for me to churn out, say, five hundred words, or two hundred fifty words with captions, as long as I’d done my research. When I tried to write for myself, though, I was paralyzed: “I need to do more research! I don’t have any character analyses or plot lines! I don’t even know anything about the city where my story is set!” When I discovered NaNoWriMo, it was the kick in the ass that I needed. Participants have to write fifty thousand words in thirty days (1667 words a day—that number is still burned onto the back of my eyelids!). I quickly learned that any amount of research I could do would probably be initially helpful, but it wouldn’t get it closer to my word count. It was a valuable exercise, one that I repeat every now and then. (I will be doing it this November! Anyone want to join me?)
- Write for other people as much as possible. If you have a time each week when you have to show a group of your friends how much work you’ve done on your novel, you’ll be much more likely to actually work. Make it shameful for yourself to have to tell everyone, “Uh. . . well. . . I had to, uh. . . bathe my dog, and then I got meningitis. . . so I’m just going to wait another week before I show it to you.” This works especially well if the people who read your writing are people you see often. If I don’t blog for a few days, and then I give a lame excuse about not having time, someone helpfully points out, “You didn’t have time because you came out to the bars with us Wednesday and Thursday, and then you hosted that tea party Friday that turned into a massive dance party-cum-drum circle…” It’s embarrassing, and I find it less embarrassing to merely make time to write rather than face the social consequences of not writing.
Most every writer I know agrees that finding time to write is one of the biggest frustrations of this career. It’s not glamorous; it’s not social; sometimes it’s not even all that fun. But everyone who makes time to write on a regular basis—whether they’re working on a novel, a blog, or a freelance article—would probably agree it’s rewarding. So do it up, kids.
Have any great tips for writing more? Share them in the comments below.
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