Even the most bumbling, unskilled person on the planet excels at making excuses for not doing things. We’re all experts at that. For people who wish to write, some of our excuses involve the relentless ticking of time.
Fiction writer and poet Lorraine Horsley wrote a great post on this topic. Read hers first, and then click back here for my take. Here are her three lies about time that we tell ourselves:
1. I don’t have time.
Your clock matches mine. I checked. Same number of hours in a day, etc. Each second and minute lasts the same for all of us, since, here on Earth, none of us travels at a significant fraction of the speed of light.
In other words, those who do make time to write have no more time than you. Other, non-writing tasks crowd their days too. Life interferes with their writing dreams too. They’re just as busy as you are.
How do they find time to write? They don’t start with an excuse about a lack of time. They turn it around to a positive—“I want to write, so I’ll make time.” They establish a habit of daily writing.
2. I’ll need several hours a day.
Again, you’re making an excuse, a reason for taking no action. If you tell yourself this one, you’ll never get started. What if you could only spare ten minutes a day for writing? At first, you wouldn’t produce much output as your brain adjusts to this new task. You’ll be tempted to give up.
If you persevere, you’ll see improvement in a few days. You’ve formed a habit and you’re seeing some output. On a few glorious occasions, you’ll achieve flow.
Here’s a chronological paradox for you—a severe time constraint can improve your writing. As an example, Ray Bradbury started out poor and couldn’t afford his own typewriter. But he knew he could find rental typewriters in the basement of the library at the University of California at Los Angeles. Ten cents bought a half hour of typing. Time is money, indeed. He typed his classic novel Fahrenheit 451 there, with the typewriter’s clock ticking.
3. I’ll make time when…
…when I graduate…when my kids are in school…when my kids move out…when I retire. Sure.
You’ve heard the one about writing a novel being a one day event? As in, “One day, I’ll write a novel.” Except you keep putting that day off, because you don’t have time now, but you think you will in the future.
Consider turning this excuse around and telling yourself, “I’ll never have more time than I do right now.” In the grand scheme, that’s true for all of us. We pay attention to little clocks, but we all have a personal, invisible Big Clock destined to stop someday. Reckoning by the Big Clock, you’ve got more time now than you will later.
Enough Excuses
To sum up, you do have time to write, you don’t need huge chunks of time to write, and you’ll never find more time to write than now. So get writing. As the comic character Snuffy Smith often said, “Time’s a’wastin’.” Not just for you. It’s also a’wastin’ for—
Poseidon’s Scribe