Grab every opportunity to write
Life is busy and most of us have other important obligations that demand our time. There’s seldom an hours-long writing slot in our lives, or if there is, it comes so late at night that we can’t stay awake to make use of it.
In her essay on learning to write without a room of one’s own, Susan Straight talks about fitting her writing around the demands of life. She writes about carrying around cheap drugstore notebooks and colored pens and writing whenever she had to pick up her kids from practice, go to a doctor’s appointment, wait for a plumber, even sit with a sick dog in her lap. Over the course of a day, these tiny precious moments of time added up to words on the page, which added up to short stories, essays, and books.
My first published piece was an essay about driving in Los Angeles, which I drafted while sitting in traffic. I was taking an evening writing class at UCLA which meant about a 90-minute crawl from my day job to the campus. I had a notebook and pen in the passenger seat. At every red light (once I was safely stopped, of course) I jotted down ideas or wrote a sentence or two. With 20-25 intersections, some of which took two or more cycles of signal to get through, by the time I arrived at my class, I had a very rough first draft of an essay.
Once home, I carved out early morning time before work to revise, workshop, and polish that essay. I submitted it to The Los Angeles Times who published it in their Sunday magazine, giving me my first published story and a whopping $400 check. I’ve carried a notebook with me ever since.
Here are some of the other ways I carved out writing time while working a full-time corporate job:
In bed before my first cup of coffee
Getting up 20 minutes earlier to write before work
On the train on my morning commute
In my car or at the local park on my lunch break
In the bathroom
Waiting for a meeting to start
Between sessions at the annual conference for a financial software company
Like exercise, writing in short bursts is just as productive (and good for our creative health) as long blocks of time. If you just don’t have any time to write, here are places you might find short blocks.
Waiting for the coffee machine to heat up or brew
On your daily commute.
Waiting for a meeting to start
In your car
While dinner cooks
In the grocery store parking lot before going into shop
In appointment waiting rooms
Waiting to pick up a family member
The added benefit of multiple short sessions a day is that there’s a greater chance that one of them will catch your muse wandering by.