The Day Job: Finding the Time

I teach high school and college English, have three school-aged children, drive a forty-minute commute to work, and I’m an essentially lazy person. I love long reading sessions where I bury myself in a recliner I bought just for reading, and I’m addicted to complete televisions series on DVDs.

Napping appeals to me.

Yet, I regularly complete writing projects and feel that writing is a vital and welcome part of my day.

So, I’m befuddled when I talk to folks who tell me they want to write but they don’t have the time.

I know why they believe that, though: Life distracts. William Wordsworth pointed out over two hundred years ago that “the world is too much with us.” Heck, just the “teaching English” part of my life is time consuming. Other English teachers ask me where I found the time to finish three books in the last five years while also publishing a bundle of short stories. How can I possibly have a day job that involves making lesson plans, standing in front of scads of kids everyday, going to meetings, conferencing with parents, grading stacks of student essays, and still be a writer? (I think they’re implying that surely I must be short changing my teaching job.)

Here’s the secret: almost everyone who is a writer has a day job. It’s the truth. Only a tiny percentage of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) makes their living through writing. The rest are, among other careers, engineers, policeman, CEOs, janitors, nurses, realtors, soldiers, short order cooks, professors, jewelers, or bricklayers. They find the time to pen the volumes of books that fill the science fiction, fantasy, and horror sections of your favorite bookstores. Even a greater percentage of stories you read in your favorite magazines and that are reviewed here at The Fix are written by writers who do their scribbling (or keyboard pecking) outside of their day jobs, because, as you surely know, they don’t make a living writing short stories.

So, how do they do it? For me, the method has been consistency, and for many writers this is the same. They have a routine. My routine is to always finish 200 or more words a day. On one hand, this looks like a terribly low bar to leap over, and laughably easy. Numerous novels are over 100,000 words, after all. Wouldn’t it take forever to finish a novel at 200 words a day? Well, not really. It would only take 500 days, less than a year and a half, if I never miss a single writing day. If you are one of those folks who are trying to figure out how to write and still keep up with the normal demands of your busy day, where will you be in 18 months? Will you still be trying to figure out when to get your writing done? Will you still be worrying that there isn’t enough time? Or will you have your novel finished?

Coincidentally enough, as I was writing this article, several other writers blogged about their daily schedule. Jay Lake, for example, who both has a day job and is a force of nature when it comes to productivity, posted his work schedule. Jay not only sells stories consistently to every magazine in the English speaking world (well, it seems that way), he also has published three novels in the last two years (Rocket Science, Mainspring, Trial of Flowers) and edited several projects.

By contrast, some full-time writers look positively unproductive!

Clearly, writing can be done, even with a day job. As I mentioned, for me the key has been in developing a routine. Many folks put off writing projects until they feel they have enough time to focus on them. Maybe that summer vacation or the long weekend next month is when they hope to really get the running start the project needs. That kind of planning is fine, in theory. But so often, when the long weekend arrives or the summer vacation begins, everything else that occupies their lives finds a way of sucking away the time. The vacation ends, and there are no words to show for it.

Perhaps planning to write during a long free time works for some people, but for most it is a recipe for futility. The problem with the plan is that the writer has no idea of what to do after the long weekend ends. Obviously there needs to be a routine after the project starts, but the writer doesn’t think about that. So, if there needs to be a routine afterwards, why wait? Start the routine now.

Thank goodness that other folks have considered the problem of writing time. Mike Stelzner offers his five tips for finding writing time. I enjoyed Kate White’s take on the writing problem in her article, “How to Write a Book When You Have No Time,” and Moira Allen’s no-nonsense approach in her article, “Time and the Writer.”

As much as I appreciate those articles, though, the real advice for writers-who-want-to-be, who also have day jobs, is the same for writers when they don’t have day jobs, and that is to sit down and write. Writing is incredibly, incredibly easy. The hand moves. The letters appear. It works that way for everyone. It could be working for you ten seconds after you finish reading this article. Take the time you have. Write when you have it. Establish a routine. And the words will pile up.