Finding Time to Write: An Example Workday in a Busy Life
Have you wanted to write a book for months or even years, but you’ve been certain that you don’t have enough time? I have good news for you: You do. I can almost guarantee that you do.
Today, I’m going to show you how to find time to write no matter how busy your life or how packed your workday is.
The first time I ever wrote a novel, I googled “how many words are in a novel?” The internet told me: about 70,000. So I just wrote until I hit that number. The draft was terrible. So I rewrote it again. And again, and again.
I was 29 and single, and because I tutored in the evenings for work, I had the luxury of hours and hours a day to stare at a computer screen, killing time, waiting for genius to arrive.
Finally, I sold that novel. And then I sold my next novel based on a proposal, meaning, I hadn’t written it yet…which is a cool thing you can do after you sell your first novel.
But this time, I was in very different circumstances: I had taken a full-time job for the healthcare, and I had just had a baby.
So, hello reality! The last time I’d written a book, I had all the time in the world and no responsibilities. Now, I had an 8-week maternity leave and a newborn who was sleeping 3 hours a night.
I did not have the luxury of staring at my computer screen for hours.
So what did I do? I figured out a process that worked for me, and I knocked out my novel in 2 hours a day over my 8-week maternity leave.
These days, I run a program teaching writers to do exactly this—write their books around their busy schedules.
If you’re thinking you don’t have time for this, I assure you that you do.
The key is to find a process that works in the life you have, not the life someone else has. So let’s look at what that might look like.
First…
First, we want your first draft to have at least 65K words, which is a respectable length for a first draft in most adult genres.
How might you get you there?
I pulled a couple of concrete examples to show you what this can look like. Now, these are real people—two people in my program the Book Incubator, and myself.
Joe is a lawyer and a writer in my program working on his first novel while maintaining his legal work.
He averages 850 words an hour and writes 45 minutes six days a week, taking Sundays off. At that rate, he’s on track to finish his novel draft—by that I mean, hit 65,000 words—in just 4 months.
You may be thinking, how does he know how many words he writes per hour?
You do a little experimenting. No one knows this until you actually sit down and write for an hour on a couple of days, then count up your words and average them.
You don’t need to be meticulous about this—a rough estimate will do.
And if you’re thinking, “HOW ON EARTH DOES JOE AVERAGE 850 WORDS AN HOUR?” The key here is that for a first draft, you are never editing as you go. You turn off your editor. You’re just getting the story down, letting the words flow. This is critical to getting your first draft down on paper—trust your writer self to revise later.
Let’s look at another example.
Sarah, another writer in my program, is a creative writing professor with a packed class schedule.
When she’s truly in writing mode, not editing mode, as we want to be for a first draft, she writes about 600 words an hour.
She writes for an hour and a half, 4 days a week. She actually puts her writing time into her work calendar so it’s booked—people can’t schedule meetings for her during this time.
She takes three full days off every week.
Sometimes her hour and a half is all in one sitting, like one big chunk, and other times, she divides it into half-hour increments between meetings and classes.
Writing in this way, she’s wrapping up her draft now after just writing for four months.
How about my personal writing schedule?
Well, I write pretty fast at about 1,000 words an hour—again, this is being in the flow, not at all revising as I go.
When I’m working on a book, I like to write every day.
I don’t write every day when I’m not working on a book, in fact I barely write at all, but while I’m actively working on a draft, I write every day.
And so, writing for about 45 minutes a day, I can typically finish a draft in under 3 months.
Think about this—45 minutes to an hour, or up to 90 minutes a few days a week, and you can finish a solid draft in one season.
This is basically a workout schedule, if you like fitness. If you can fit working out into your life, you can fit writing a book into your life.
Second…
There’s one more idea I want to leave you with today.
It doesn’t matter where you write. You don’t need a desk. You don’t need a ritual, or to light a candle, or to use special software.
One of my writers, Liz, finished her second novel in the driver’s seat of her minivan in the carpool pickup line. She was handwriting it in a notebook, which is also how I write my first drafts, and which I’ll teach you how to do in my free training if you apply for my program below.
Another writer, Pushpa, is a doctor at a hospital and wrote her novel on the notes app of her phone in between patients.
I talked to a writer the other day who dictates his novels while he walks his dog—and he’s published dozens of novels he’s written this way.
The idea that you need to be in a specific place or write in a certain fashion to be a real writer is nonsense.
You do what works for you, schedule-wise, and tools-wise.
Speaking of writers I work with—are you writing a book, or want to write a book?
Ready to write your book?
Now—I want to talk about you. Are you writing a book, or want to write a book?
Because if so, I want to hear from you.
When I’m not writing, my mission in life is to help writers write their dream books.
If you're curious to know more, I have a free video walking you through my process for writing a book.
Just go to thebookincubator.com to tell me a little bit about you and your book—you can fill out a form online. I hope to hear from you!
