Making Time for Writing

My life is full. I like it like that, mostly. So how do I find time to write? The fact is that the busier I am, the more I am inspired.

These days the job that pays the bills is a job-share. I’m “half-time” GP / family doctor in Cambridge. I try hard to squeeze those 30 working hours into three days. Even if I end up staying late at the surgery, I strive to complete everything so that I leave work with my head clear. Then as I cycle home, two things compete for brain-space: what we’ll have for dinner and whatever writing project I’m currently pondering. Like what new topic I’ll cover in my 155^th 1000-word travel health piece for Wanderlust magazine. What new angle is there? What hot news can I use as a hook? I like to kick ideas around before I settle to write.

Most weeks I have the luxury of two days (as well as the weekends) when I don’t have to go to my clinic to work, so in theory these should be clear for writing. But you know how it is there’s:

• shopping to do
• cleaning
• and laundry
• meals to prepare
• pets to clean out
• my Ma to take to the doctor
• my son to collect from uni or help with an assignment
• visitors
• calls from friends / the surgery / the family
• household admin
• bills to pay
• servicing the car / boiler, etc.

I need to be a ruthlessly bad parent / wife / daughter and have a sluttishly filthy home to get any writing done at all. There is also the competition between what I am committed to write – informing articles feel a bit like ‘work’ – and the creative prose I want to write. This can be tantalising and frustrating at times as I’m pulled in several directions.

I am quite good – creatively – in the morning and when I had three children under six to field and I was trying to home school my eldest, I was working on a family travel health guide, Your Child Abroad. I took to deliberately rising early so that I could get at least a solid hour of writing or editing in before everyone else woke. It was so great to get this uninterrupted think-time, but it only lasted a couple of days.

My six-year-old had become quite good at taking himself back to bed if he woke early and we were sleeping or drowsing but when he discovered that I was at my desk he knew I was fair game for dealing with requests for breakfast pancakes / making armour / playing draughts / helping build Lego castles / making bows and arrows from stick and string.

I set my alarm to wake an hour earlier. That worked for a couple more mornings but soon the six-year-old again sensed I was awake and would join me – grinning – at my desk. I set the alarm one hour still earlier but even being up at 5am didn’t work for long. I gave up the early stints and tried to find a babysitter – who was never quite as interesting as Mum at her desk. I resigned myself to short-attention-span pieces, so it was good that the travel health guide fitted that job-description admirably. Perhaps that is why I didn’t settle to writing the book that exposed my soul until the eldest was at school and I had more help. Even then A Glimpse of Eternal Snows took me more than a decade to complete.

I remain a morning person and sometimes wake with a blindingly brilliant idea for a tale or an article. Travel also sets my creative juices flowing and I have the habit of carrying a small note book to record ideas, snatches of conversation, scenes or even things to look up. Something will prod a memory and I’ll be back in an amusing or embarrassing event that might give me the start of an article, a scene in a book or a theme for a blog. Detail is what brings prose alive yet it can be remarkably difficult to recall on demand.

Sometimes a journey – like the current one between London and Yangon – simply allows me enough time to draft an entire piece. But I’m a consummate eaves-dropper which although a rich seam to mine for a writer, can make it difficult to tune out. There is, for example, a Hindi-speaking mother and young daughter in the seat behind me and I love the way they completely mix up English with their mother tongue, even mid-sentence; they choose the word from the language that best describes the subject. But you see, I digress.

A few years ago I signed up for a Reflective Writing course aimed at GPs. The facilitator asked us to decide on our favourite colour, then write for three minutes. I was baffled. How can you write about the colour blue? I found it strangely difficult to let go, abandon all structure and write stream-of-consciousness prose. It took some practice but it proved cathartic and opened up more areas of literary inspiration. The process is supposed to be a health-giving habit and our facilitator encouraged us all to write for six minutes every day. This helps brain-dump the clutter in your head.

Some writers have strict routines. I doubt many women can manage that. I certainly do nothing as a routine or habit. Maybe that’s why my most important work takes so long to emerge. It might also explain why I always have several writing projects on the boil at once – which reminds me I really, really should return to editing my eco-adventure story for kids.

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Dr Jane Wilson-Howarth is a general practitioner based in the city of Cambridge (UK). For 11 years she worked on health promotion and child survival in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nepal. She has written two travel narratives (about Nepal and Madagascar), three travel health guides and a novel set in Nepal; she is a regular contributor to Wanderlust magazine. In March 2015 A Glimpse of Eternal Snows was launched by Speaking Tiger in Delhi. This is the third publisher in the third continent to publish this memoir. Jane posts blogs sporadically on her website www.wilson-howarth.com
Follow Jane on twitter @longdropdoc

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