Writing Time, Where You At?

Strategies (both successful and failed) for carving out time for a writing practice

A topic I find myself discussing a lot with friends lately: how does one find the time to write? This question feels particularly salient for anyone trying to balance (a) work with (b) parenting/caregiving with (c) a strong need for regular exercise/outdoor time with (d) a reality that really hit home for me during the pandemic—that, valuable as solitude is, (my) mental health is also dependent on regular social contact, in person, with other humans. 

Sometimes I envy people who don’t seem to have these same time-intensive needs, as I’d surely get more writing done without them—but what am I going to do? Family, friends, work, running … these are the pillars of my life! I wouldn’t be me without them.

Just a girl and her desk, back when finding time each day to write at it was no problem. (I dug this photo up for a recent reading I did at Salon of Shame, and I can’t decide what I love most about it—the rotary phone? The Magic 8-Ball and troll collection? The epic encyclopedia set?)

I once listened to an interview with an author who wrote an entire book during her daily bus commute over the course of one year. I used to work with someone—an athlete, and a dad to young children—who took a one-hour lunch break every day to sit by himself in his car in our office parking lot and work on a screenplay. Another writer I once heard interviewed said she did a lot of writing in the parking lot of Costco; why not borrow five minutes here and there to draft up a scene on her iPhone while the kids were still buckled into their carseats in the back of the minivan?

Learning about the habits and dedication of writers like these makes me feel equal parts inspiration and shame. On one hand: Oh! I have an iPhone! I go to Costco! I could write books this way, too! On the other hand, the shame: Why haven’t I been more intentional with my time? Why, whenever I’m sitting in traffic, am I not dictating chapters into a voice recorder? Why am I not editing my memoir in the grocery store line?

Here’s one reason why: As with running, I need a little time to warm up. With writing, that looks like: reading, often; uninterrupted time to think; setting an intention for my session that day; some writerly throat-clearing on the page. Will I ever be someone who finds a way to fold writing, in tiny increments, into the cracks of my already-jam-packed daily life? I doubt it.

Another parallel with running: I’ve found that scheduling non-tiny amounts of time (at least an hour, preferably two) in advance is essential. Hoping time to write will just show up out of the blue, and that I’ll reliably take advantage of it when it does, has not been a winning strategy for me.

So, some different time-blocking strategies I’ve experimented with:

• Writing at night after my daughter goes to sleep (Probably my most successful strategy; much as I aspire to be a morning person, I’m a night owl by nature, and I like the theoretically boundless time frame of writing in the evening; that said, after a long day, do I always have the energy, or lack of competing priorities (household duties, emails to catch up on, need for sleep, etc.), to write at the end of the day? I do not.)

• The 5 a.m. club (The aspirational morning person in me loves this one because if I just got up when the 5 a.m. alarm clock went off, I’d have a 2-hour writing window every morning, which sounds so heavenly in theory; in practice, I am a prolific presser of the snooze button and cannot remember the last time I got myself to bed by 9 p.m. in order to support membership in this club)

• Writing at the YMCA (Ours offers 2-hour blocks of free childcare during certain hours, which I’ve generally used to run on the treadmill or lift weights, but occasionally I instead use that time to write, and it is glorious)

• Writing on my lunch break (Hard; my day job involves a desk, a screen and a fair amount of concentrated brain power, so by the time lunch rolls around, I need a break from those things to recharge my batteries)

• Writing in the same room as my child (Hahaha! No. At least, not yet. We’re still in a pretty attention-demanding phase of her life, and I’m fine with that; I know the time will come all too soon that she doesn’t insist on telling me or asking me something every 45 seconds, so I’ve all but given up on this approach for the time being. In the long run, though, I take inspiration from my own mom and I playing “library” together in my childhood; she’d put on classical music and a pot of tea, and we’d each read our own books quietly in one another’s presence; this is still one of my favorite ways to spend time with another person, and someday maybe my daughter and I can do that together, too, not just with reading but also writing or other creative pursuits)

Also: As a good friend of mine (a runner, writer, mom and human extraordinaire) recently mused in an Instagram post, let’s all acknowledge that life has seasons, and not all pursuits—even the ones we’re passionate about—have to be jammed into every season. We can take breaks. (Sometimes those breaks last years.) We can change our priorities. We can do hard things, or we can choose to opt out of doing things at all.

Want to know how I eked out an 85,000-word memoir manuscript between September 2021 and June 2022? By taking a year off from racing to repurpose the 6-10 hours a week I typically devote to running/training and instead using that time to write. It worked! I finished my rough draft. Did my mental health suffer without my usual endorphin fix and reliance on the emotional escapism of running? It did!

Want to know why nearly two years have passed and I’m still not done working through revisions of that manuscript, and probably won’t be anytime soon? Because I didn’t want to take anymore time off from running/racing. Because I have a three-year-old. Because the lottery gods finally let me into Hardrock this year, which has been a running dream of mine for more than a decade, and so between now and mid-July, running takes precedence over writing on my scale of discretionary life priorities.

None of these are excuses. They’re just facts. Time is a limited commodity. That’s OK. There will be other seasons in my life where I will have more free time at my disposal than I do now. And even if I were to not write another word between now and then, it wouldn’t make me any less of a writer. (She says, trying to convince herself.)

That said, I do find myself happier when I don’t lose complete touch with the writer part of me, even if her times to shine are few and far between.

So, from the midst of this particular season of my life, here are a few strategies I’ve found helpful:

• Letting go of other things I enjoy and, at one time or another, have made a part of my daily life (e.g., for me, cooking/baking, snowboarding, yoga, doing crossword puzzles, watching TV) because, again, there are seasons for everything in life

• Keeping lists of writing glimmers in the Reminders app on my phone

• Using solo easy runs as my warmup (see: “uninterrupted time to think”) for a writing session

• Along those same lines, trying to never sit down to write without already knowing in my head what I want to work on that day (sometimes this just means glancing over my writing glimmers list and picking one to dig into)

• Avoiding social media when sitting down to write (duh, I know, but I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I’ve carved out time to write and then squandered it with mindless scrolling instead)

• Finding ways to incorporate writing into my social landscape (this Substack! + attending or participating in local readings or book launch events, book clubs, talking about books or writing on runs with like-minded friends)

• Signing up for short-term writing classes or workshops (I used my lunch break on Wednesdays in January to take a four-week essay-writing class on Zoom, which helped keep me accountable to an essay project I really wanted to work on)

Bottom line: I’m still figuring this out. I have no answers. Just musings. And curiosity about what strategies all you other busy, passionate humans use to create the space in your daily lives for writing. When do you write? Where do you write? Tell me everything!