Cut the bull shit and make time to write

That’s the title of a blog post by Alejandro Escamilla (found here) that I found inspiring and hung on my wall over my desk and computer.

Cut the bull shit and make time to write.

So elegant. So simple. Exactly what my inner writer needed to hear every day to get motivated and get writing- blog posts, articles, queries, that novel I have 30 K words in.

And you know how much I got done while that was hanging on my wall? Nothing. Well, barely anything. I got a few letters done, I got lengthy facebook arguments typed and mostly deleted, I got work that had to be done, done.

But those blog posts, articles and that novel (it’s brilliant, btw. Makes me cry at parts)? Nada.

I obviously couldn’t cut the bull shit and simply make time to write.

I felt like a failure. Those words, up there, that started as inspiration, were mocking me. It was my fault I wasn’t writing, I simply needed to make time for it. I mean, “If you can’t spare 20 minutes to devote to your shitty novel then you’re in the wrong circus, clown.”

I tore it down from the wall, my stomach sick with all the dashed hopes and the realization I was a failure.

Then it hit me, though. I am not a failure. Just because I had found the 20 minutes to write (and delete) an obnoxious, infuriating face book post and yet could not find the 20 minutes to work on that novel (trust me, it’s great— it’s the rewriting of a classic story) did not mean I had frittered away 20 useful minutes on junk rather than gold.

Because every 20 minutes, every 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week is not the same.

Repeat that with me: All time is not created equal.

Every minute you have you spend differently based on the time before it.

Saturday morning. You wake up, get morning chores done, and get a hot cup of coffee. You sit to write your novel that you have been thinking about since you left off of it last night to get to bed. Mail comes, and you glance at it. Some junk, a bill, nothing much. You settle in and grind out 30 minutes of hard writing and arise, pleased with yourself.

Or.

Saturday morning. You wake up, dreading to get up because the kitchen is a mess. It takes you forever to find the coffee because someone put it away where it didn’t belong. You want to sit down and write that novel, but the dog throws up and the kids are fighting and your mom calls that she got into a fight with her neighbor and you need to play grown up. You get a hot cup of coffee, and mail comes. Bills, including something over due (how did that happen) a letter from your kid’s school about a lice break out, and a notice you have 30 days to repaint your house because the paint is peeling. You look at the computer, and even if you could lock the door for 30 minutes, what’s the use? You don’t have the strength, even if you had the time.

Yes, each of those Saturday mornings has an identical number of minutes in them. But your ability to use those minutes is completely different. Add to the second Saturday the knowledge that you are a failure because you can’t even get 30 minutes writing done, and you’ll be lucky to ever write again.

Writing, real writing, is hard work. It’s not something you can just jump into, with no prep work. You’d never expect an athlete to be able to lunge into work not being physically prepared, but helpful advice columns think we can leap into writing because we have a spare 20 minutes. With no stretching, no nourishment, no warm up. Yes, if we were doing it 30 minutes or more a day, we probably could jump in, because it’d all be fresh in our minds and our writing muscles would be practiced. But they aren’t. I’d need to reread my 30K words and my notes to get back into my heroine’s head and speak with her voice again. Writing 20 minutes worth of ‘crap’ just to get something written is still 20 minutes wasted (and this is NOT the same as perfectionism), regardless of what the motivators say.

So yes. I need to write. I need to carve out time for myself every day. But when some days finding the time to take a shower is hard, I also need to be gentle with myself for not finding the time to write.

There are ways to motivate yourself to write, or indeed, do anything. Beating yourself up or allowing someone else to is not one of them.

So, cut the bull shit, be good to yourself, and figure out what you need to do to get time to write.