Finding Time to Write Part II

Photo by Rick Bowden

I was skimming through Marc Shapiro's J. K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter when something caught my eye. Despite the pressure of being a single mother, working to stay alive, and all that "rubbish", she manage to find the time to write and completed The Sorcerer's Stone in one year. It's not as if she had unlimited time on her hands. But she prioritized her writing.

She wrote during train rides, at cafes, on scraps of papers. She rushed to finish her secretarial work so that she could use the corporate computer to write. She prayed constantly that no one would have a birthday or a meeting that she'd be obliged to attend.

Every spare moment she had, she wrote.

I know we have busy lives. I know that we rush to take care of families, work, and the occasional curve balls life throws at us. I know that writing can seem like just another thing on an already full plate.

But maybe we're just forgetting why we write. We write because we want to. No one's forcing you to do anything. So just remember your first writing sessions when writing was pulling characters from thin air and watching them walk around the page.

We need to stop dreading the blank page. If you've lost the love of writing, try free-writing every day before you write your novel. It gets your creative juices flowing before you have to tackle the novel.

In all honesty, this post title is a lie. We don't Find time to write; we Make time.