Forcing it - If you can't write, write anyway

I've had a miserable time writing recently. I have ideas, I have the phrasing I want, I have characters and storylines laid out in my head. What I don't have is time.

I was going strong for a while - I was writing thousands of words for this blog, I was trying to use twitter effectively (that's actually never worked well for me), I was writing a long piece of fiction and finishing several pages every day and it all went to shit over one tiny thing.

My boss changed my lunch break.

I know that sounds more like a shitty excuse than something that should completely upset my writing paradigm, but hear me out: I work nine to five, five days a week with a commute that's between one hour and two hours each way, so my day varies from ten to twelve hours of working time; making and consuming breakfast and dinner takes up another two hours, checking up on all of the blogs and the store for Rough Writers takes another hour or so, emailing people and calling family is another hour, and I'm designing a chapbook at the moment so I've decided to give up a couple hours sleep a night to make that go faster for the sake of everyone involved. Not counting showering, writing my weekly blog, reading a couple of webcomics and maybe talking to a friend once in a while, if I try to get seven hours worth of sleep I'm at more than twenty four hours a day, and so I've started wishing for a time turner.

About a month a go my boss changed my lunch break to half an hour from an hour and I've lost all my free time for the day.

So what do I do? I can't even force my lazy ass to do a couple of situps every day because I'm stretched so thin on time, how the hell can I write?

I write anyway.

There is never a perfect situation for writing. You'll never have six months to yourself in a European cafe with a stack of notebooks and no impositions on your time. You're always going to have to work, eat, sleep, and shit, and so there will always be some demand that pulls you away from the perfect metaphor at just the moment that you can't afford to be distracted.

Am I pissed that I lost the half-hour I used to use to write a couple of pages? Yes. Have I lost some of my momentum? Yes. Is that going to stop me? Fuck no.

When you lose your writing time, whether it's because of work, an eighteen hour class load, a cross-country move, or anything else that may get in your way you simply have to make more time.

Do you know why it takes some authors decades to get published? Because it takes them days to get a page down on paper. When you've got a full time job, any kind of a social life, and basic human needs that must be met it's terribly inconvenient to sit down and write out a story. Even if you ditch your friends (and if any of my friends are reading this, I'm sorry, I'm aware that I'm a terrible friend) it's not going to be easy to polish a poem or lay down a chapter or transcribe an interview, but we don't write because it's easy or convenient. We write because we're writers, and if we don't at least make an attempt to put a pen to paper we'll go batshit crazy and start stabbing co-workers at some point.

My stories are more important to me than sleep, and writing these blogs means more to me than eating a decent meal. I want to write more than I want to do almost anything in my life and I'm not going to let a truncated lunch break get in the way of that, even if it means that I have to change the focus of my writing or go without things like vegetables or a relaxing weekend.

So if you're finding yourself pressed for time, or if you think you're too busy to sit down and sketch out a story, write anyway.

Change what you're writing if it helps - since I haven't had time to work on longer stuff I've been thinking more about these blogs and attempting to put more effort into drawing, when I have a second, and I've even started a humor blog that lets me combine silly drawings and silly words in a short format - if it doesn't help then write what you were writing before and just understand that it'll take a week to write a page where it used to take an hour. You may not have an hour to sit down and think through what you're doing, but I'm willing to bet that you've got a smartphone that you can type on while you're sitting on the john.  

Write anyway. Write when you've got a couple minutes between classes, take smoke breaks even if you aren't a smoker and write on your break, write while you're waiting for your coffee at Starbucks, write while you're letting your nail polish dry, write while you're in line, write in the bathroom (but please wash you hands) and write when you're waiting for the oven timer to tell you that dinner is done.

Write because if you let anything get in your way and keep you from writing completely, you're not a writer anymore.

Good luck, I mean it. And keep writing.

If you'd like to see the short-format blog I've started, or if you hate hipsters, you can visit my new side project: Hipstlator - the hipster translator.

If you'd like to see how the cover for John Brantingham's upcoming chapbook, Study Abroad, got started you can watch the black and white sketch being made.

If you don't want to look at either of those things, I like you anyway. Have a good day.

Cheers,
     - Alli