When You Don’t Have Time To Write

“I don’t have time to write” is my least favorite mantra, one that I’ve so often heard from lapsed and would-be writers. I used to chant it a lot to myself, and the more I repeated it the more I believed it. It became an immutable fact of life – until an unlikely situation shifted things for me.

A couple of years ago my husband was diagnosed with cancer. The subsequent thirteen months involved a rigorous course of treatment set against a backdrop of pain, confusion, and determination. During that tumultuous time, I’d collapse into bed at night and take out my cell phone. Fighting against sleep I’d open a note-taking application and start to type or — if that minor act of exertion usurped too much energy — I’d use the voice-to-text function to speak my thoughts instead.

Compelled to record my day-to-day observations of this surreal situation, I expressed my thoughts on everything from the art I noticed on the walls of the hospital while nurses placed a feeding tube down my husband’s throat, to the comfort of the rising moon on the day surgeons reconstructed one of his organs.

One excruciatingly long year later his body was blessedly free from cancer, and I was surprised to discover that the bits and pieces of writing I’d done along the way (most of which were completed in under 10 minutes a pop) totaled more than 125 single-spaced pages when compiled and dropped into a blank document. Those moments lying in bed writing at the end of the day had added up. Without even realizing it I had created a very loose first draft of a memoir that detailed the rocky road of cancer caretaking. And, I’d accidentally uncovered the power of writing in tiny increments.

Had I been paying better attention, perhaps, the predictable accumulation of sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into pages wouldn’t have caught me off guard. The idea that small acts lead to great things is not new, after all. Aesop illustrated the concept beautifully in “The Tortoise and the Hare,” showing that wee, steady steps outshine wild, frenetic leaps any day of the week.

Maybe it’s the monotonous routine of the tortoise’s pace versus the freedom of the hare’s undisciplined ways that deters us from creating a sustainable creative practice. Certainly at the time my husband got sick I was not grounded in an unshakeable writing routine, and his illness only served to further erode any sense of consistency that I might have tried to impose.

Yet, somehow during the most challenging time of my life I accomplished as much (if not more) writing than if I’d been engaged in my usual habit of avoiding it for months then binging on it for weeks at a time. Avoid, binge, avoid, binge. It was a rhythm of sorts, but certainly not a satisfying one. It was steeped in procrastination and too easily derailed. Over the years the periods of time when I was avoiding the work grew longer, while the times I was actually writing grew shorter. Conversely, the regularity of writing for ten minutes before bed was easy. It needed no forethought or dramatic gestures.

Seeing the fruitful results of my nightly writing ritual showed me that creativity exists as much in the small moments as it does in the large swaths of unhurried time. It caused me to ponder how many idle, spare moments we all have throughout the day. Moments such as the minutes between getting ready for work and the carpool’s arrival, or moments spent in the dentist’s office waiting for the kids to finish having their teeth cleaned.

These short stretches of downtime provide a crucial ebb to our lives’ productive flow, while also being ripe with creative potential. I learned that we can tap these unmemorable, unproductive micro-periods to explore self-expression through writing. My experience proves that staying connected to our practice doesn’t have to be a big deal. It can be as simple as a few sleepy moments of documentation before we drift to dream. Because in the end, it’s not so much about finding the time as it is about reclaiming it.

For those folks who, like me, crave to write, but struggle with sustainability of practice, I recommend you to break things down into smaller parts until that smallness becomes almost incidental. Don’t have ten minutes to write? Try five. Don’t have five? Try one. No, seriously. Try one minute of creative writing per day for a week and see what happens. First and foremost, you’ll find it will be hard to stop after sixty seconds.

One minute will probably turn into two. Sure, you may balk at the idea of writing for only two minutes a day, but do that for a week and you’ll end up with a page. That’s one page that likely wouldn’t have gotten finished otherwise. And, writing begets writing – the more you do it, the more you do it. Take it from me, the best part of kickstarting a sustainable writing practice is the satisfaction you’ve feel by accomplishing more than you imagined you could. From there you can let go of that tired, old “no time to write” excuse and replace it with a new mantra, one that supports your writing rather than derailing it.

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips