It is always hard to find the time to write. It seems to be the issue at blame when I say I can’t write. There will be half a dozen ideas swimming around in my head and never enough time to get them onto paper, which is where they need to be. In a dream situation, there would be a magic button on the keyboard which, when pressed, would telepathically import every word in the brain into a document on the computer. But the reality is that the labour of writing makes it precious. Time taken is what defines the writing process.
The dilemma is simple. There are only so many hours in the day, and not enough left of leisure for writing. But perhaps writing doesn’t need as many hours as we think. Dickens said that by writing a little a day a writer could succeed at their craft. An hour is a small amount of time when you are hammering away at something as long as a novel. An hour is the space used for lunch, or time spent waiting for the next class, the next bus or train, even the time spent being bored as the rice boils for dinner.
The majority of the writing process is developing ideas before you can get them down on the page. Most of the time you are ‘writing’, you are actually just thinking, figuring things out. You can’t physically write on a bus, for instance, but you can iron out plot details, character descriptions, dialogues, so that when you get home and have forty minutes to spare you can use that time to get valuable words onto paper. Take an hour a day to write the finished product of your day’s thoughts, without any procrastination, and it may just be enough time to write something good.
By Rebecca Drake