It’s going to happen someday. You’re going to open your inbox, and it’s not going to be the headline that makes your eyes leap to that one email. Your blood pressure’s going to rise, and it’s going to seem like Chrome slows down in opening that email that’s going to change your life.
Well, maybe you don’t, but I do.
I don’t think it’s impossible to write when you’re busy. It’s easy to make excuses about why you don’t have time to be a writer. I don’t want to create more obstacles for you. You should write, whether you have space or not.
But if you’re like me, you’re too busy. You’re checking your email too often. You’re committed to too many projects and groups and even people. You need more space.
I have been a book author and artist for close to twenty years. I have paid for my mortgage, groceries, vacations and braces with my self-generated income. I have sold a blessed two million copies of my words and pictures.
And yet, until about five years ago, I stumbled through an introduction of my work and my abilities. It may have sounded something like this…
I’m not ready. I’m not good enough. That’s not my book to write. That book’s already been written. What if they hate it? I’m scared.
In our online conversation two weeks ago, I exhorted The Write Practice community to answer three fundamental questions about their writer’s soul, and asked you to tell me what you need help with the most.
The one thing that most of you called out for, overwhelmingly, was time. Well, you’re in luck because that is my all-time (pun intended) favorite fascination. So much so that I wrote a book and am running a seminar series on it.
The burning question is, how do we find more time in our ridiculous schedules to write? How can we expand, stretch, push the limits of the time we do have? How do we bleed out those extra seconds, minutes, and hours we’re having to spend sitting in traffic/doodling in desperation in mind-numbing company meetings/frozen in line at the grocery store/stuck in the unavoidable time warp of the post office?
But I will.
You will always encounter impediments to your writing. You will regularly want to procrastinate. You will often want to distract yourself. You will sometimes even want to quit writing altogether.
This is normal. This is the work. If it was easy, everyone would be great writers with dozens of books to their names. But of course, it’s not easy. You will do it anyway.
