On Finding Time To Write

... or even finding time to read about writing

I found this meme the other day. (Is that what you call it? Every time I say ‘meme’ to my eleven-year-old daughter she says ‘don’t say meme, mummy, it sounds weird when you say it’).

Anyway, I digress, I found this meme the other day and it made me smile, and I wanted to share it with you because it’s on a theme that has been nagging at me for a while.

This week I received an email from a lovely reader who felt she just didn’t have space at the moment to write or even get the most from these posts arriving in her inbox, too much was going on at home and I felt for her.

Finding time to write can feel like a bit of a luxury with so much else going on, so many other things demanding our attention: jobs, partners, housekeeping, kids, life…. just life!

I enjoy reading widely across Substack, but I’ve noticed there are a lot of writers giving themselves a hard time: a hard time for not being good enough; a hard time for not staying relevant enough; a hard time for not working hard enough; a hard time for not finding more time.

If you are signed up to multiple writing craft newsletters, as I am, you might even find it a little overwhelming. All those writing exercises are great, and so generously put together for you, but you can’t possibly do them all, you might not even read them all.

When I shared my weather exercise with you a couple of weeks ago, I made a point of saying ‘you don’t need to do this every day.’ And on my dog walk this morning, I chastised myself for not having done it myself for a few days and then reminded myself of what I’d said to you - that’s ok, I could just start again at that moment.

So what I did then was look up and around me: I took in the perfect blue skies free of chemtrails, felt the sun cutting through two degrees of cold and warming my cheeks, looked down at the earth to see the patterns the frost had made on the grass, as I did I noticed the long shadows from a sun that had only been up an hour or so. Hmm… there might be something there, I quickly wrote in my phone: the morning sun’s lazy shadows stretch across a blanket of frost.

Phew, I’d done it, I do practice what I preach, but I’d also stopped for a minute – stopped in this busy world we live in to focus on one single thing.

The point of these exercises, or any that I share with you in the future, or our monthly meet up, is not to pile more pressure on you of what you should be doing, or could be doing. You don’t even have to do them at all, they can sit at the back of your mind, percolating, and one day, when you need them, you will pull them from that great archive of yours and they will be there, helpful to you – I first heard about that weather exercise seven years ago, I’ve only just started doing it.

But the weather exercise, as many of you realised, is not just a writing exercise, it is not just for writers, it is a meditation, it is emptying your head of all those other things that you’ve got racing round in there and focusing on one thing – what’s the weather doing today? (If you haven’t caught up on that post by the way, or you are a new subscriber, you can do so here).

Writing can be a meditation, it is for me. As a single parent, self-employed, my head is busy all the time with all sorts of worries (financial, emotional), but when I write, I have one single focus, getting the words onto the page in some sensible, creative and hopefully illuminating way.

Life is hard enough off the page, I don’t want to make it any harder, I don’t want to give myself a hard time. I want to be kind to myself, isn’t that what we all should be doing? We forget that sometimes.

So while I love reading posts from writers, and while I know that to be a writer requires some degree of neurosis in the first place, I don’t beat myself up about not making it to my computer, not doing an exercise I’ve paid to have access to, not acting immediately on the advice I’ve read – and so I don’t want you to do the same.

I remember one of my mentees – and she reads this letter so she will know who she is – would always say during our monthly catch ups when I checked in on her, that she was ‘enjoying’ herself writing, that it made her happy. What more could we ask for? What more do we write for?

Money? Yes, but there’s no guarantee of that. Fame? Maybe, if you’re into that sort of thing, but that rarely lasts and you spend the rest of your life chasing it. Recognition? Yes, we can’t doubt that we want to find a reader – but remember they say bad things as well as good.

First we write for ourselves. We write as a meditation. We write to understand the world better - you do not need to be a writer to do that, you just need to be able to focus for one minute, two, five, ten – it doesn’t matter.

If you didn’t write today, there is tomorrow. And this applies to anything, a diet, a period of sobriety, exercise, saving… which brings me back to that meme at the top which made me smile.

Now of course books don’t get written if you keep failing to turn up to the page. That’s called a mission and that’s something different and I can help you with that too. But what I’m talking about is a way of life, a mindset, one we can apply to any part of our lives. We think we need to do so many things. We don’t.

I have an exercise for you now that I find keeps life and our responsibilities in perspective, and if you would like to hang around to do it, then I’d love to have you with us because I think it might just shift your perspective on all the things that you think you need to do, that you think you are responsible for. This is not an exercise for writers, this is an exercise for all of us, so I’d urge you to stick around for this one, plus the story of how I came across it is rather personal, and it was life-changing for me as I’ll explain …