It's Time to Make Time for Your Writing

A few years ago, I decided I wanted to be the type of person who journals. I bought a beautiful black leather journal, filled with conviction that it would be completed within six months.

I was woefully mistaken.

From then until now, I have probably written on no more than twenty pages of that journal. I did, however, find an alternative. A high school teacher gifted me a journal that only asked me to write one sentence a day. It was manageable. So manageable, in fact, that I have used it consistently for the past two and a half years.

The reason I did not succeed in my full-length journaling endeavors is the same reason that many writers never get their projects off the ground: time. Writing, especially when it is not part of our academic or work-related responsibilities, is often pushed aside to the bottom of our list of priorities. We have more important things to do, so we put off that novel or that article or that blog post. With no concrete due date in sight, we often ignore the writing projects that we should be working on.

I have always wondered at this mindset, even as I fall victim to it myself. If you want to be better at playing a sport, you practice. If you want to learn a language, you practice. If you want to improve your singing voice, you practice. So why don’t we view writing as something we need to practice?

After all, Michael Phelps didn’t become the most decorated Olympian of all time without training for hours a day. Just as J.K. Rowling did not become one of the best-selling authors of all time without first spending five years planning the Harry Potter series.

You’ll never be a great writer if you don’t make time for your writing. But forget about even being a great writer—you’ll never finish a writing project if you don’t prioritize your writing. If you have to, pencil it in like a doctor’s appointment. Add it to your daily to-do list.

Some of the best advice I have ever been given is to set myself a daily word goal. It can be anywhere from 500 words a day to 2000, just as long as you’re not overwhelming yourself. Your daily word goal should be something that you can fit into your schedule without feeling stressed or pressured to write. You want to push yourself to write, but not at the cost of taking all the fun out of writing.

If you have time to watch Netflix, you have time to write. Do it during your lunch break, while your children are napping, on the train to work, in the ten minutes you unwind before going to bed. Write on your laptop, on your phone, on a napkin, on a spare scrap of paper. No matter how large or small the project, if you put your mind to it, you will find the time to write.

And remember, even when you do master your craft, you always need a second pair of eyes to look over your work before you’re ready to publish it. That’s why we are here to help.