Writing with a full schedule

[T.]

So here we are, a group of readers and many, many writers, and I want to ask all the writers out there how they manage to get it done (on time, if you have deadlines) with life running amok around you.

I myself have a full time job. I work 10, sometimes 12 hours a day, 5 to 6 days a week. There is no option to cut back as I'm supporting my wife and four granddaughters. Then there are those granddaughters. Lovely creatures, all, but at ages 6, 7, 8, and 10, they are TWO handfuls, with a lot slipping through my fingers. Am I busy? Do I have a full schedule? You bet.

But I also have this itch. I have stories and ideas floating around in my head and the only way to get them out is to sit down at the keyboard and fill the screen. Is my writing any good? Dunno. My editor thinks so, but you can be the judge of that. That's not my point. My point is...

When? When do I get time to do it? I get up at 5am (the only quiet time in this house) to write and sometimes it's just not there. Or, infuriatingly, my muse wants to speak to me 30 minutes before I have to be at work. Or WHILE I'm at work. Or when I'm home and the kids are being kids and there's no chance of sitting at this keyboard, filling this screen, getting the stuff out of my head to make room for the other stuff clamoring for attention.

I DO somehow manage to do it. Once the burner is lit and I have the time I can crank out 10 or 20 pages in a few hours and satisfy the itch for a little while. But it's slow going. I've only managed 12 chapters of a book in the last six months. And I so dearly want to get more done.

So how do you do it? How do you steal time from the universe to scratch your itch?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[Werner]

T., like you, I have a fulltime job and a whole lot of family responsibilities, and I don't have any handy answers to the problem; I'm as open to suggestions for how to squeeze more writing in as you are! Right now, I have Friday and Saturday off from work; but my wife and I both have Saturday off, so that's our day to spend together. So I try hard to squeeze in some writing on Friday; but chores and the business of daily life usually occupy much of that day as well. :-(

[Deb]

Other than rising early from your warm bed...someone in my writing group had a Sony device that would connect to Dragon. He would talk to it for a half hour or hour, then plug it into his Dragon software and walk away. Dragon would then type the dictation into his word document. You might, for example, dictate as you drive to work.

I use Dragon version 8 (some versions are better than others). You still have to go back and edit. (For instance, Dragon might type "frankly" as "Frank Lee"), but it does save time.

[T.]

Dragon sounds interesting. I'll have to look into it. I've never tried dictating my stories, though, as I understand it, that is how Whitley Streiber writes all his novels. Poor guy. Wonder if he was dictating when the aliens grabbed him (man, I'm awful).

[Thad]

Probably nearly every writer in this group has a job and plenty of family responsibilities, and a struggle finding time to write! The way I grabbed time to write the ten stories in my collection was to eat my meals, any time that I was home alone at mealtime, at the computer table and type while I chewed. (I figured I had to take time to eat anyway, so this was a way of multitasking.) It might not work for everybody --and might not even for me now; this was a few years ago-- but it was a workable approach for me at the time.

[Werner]

Writing while I eat meals at the computer table won't work for me. When I'm at home (and even on meal breaks at work), I generally do eat at the computer; but for me, that's my time to get on Goodreads. :-)