Making time to write

Illustration copyright Matt Clare at Mono Design

I don't know about you, but I love seeing how people fit writing into their lives. Here’s the way I found time to write my first book.

To paint a bit of a picture of my world for you, you need to know I have two kids, Mister Three and Miss Seven. Miss Seven is at primary school Monday to Friday, and Mister Three is mostly at home with me, but goes to child-care two days a week.

Those two days are my absolutely non-negotiable, bum-on-the-seat writing days, though they are never long enough. (I still have to drop Miss Seven to school, where I am NOT allowed to leave before final farewell kisses after her morning assembly, then drive Mister Three to child care. At his drop-off, there are more farewell kisses and an elaborate routine of pretending I have lost him, asking people if they have seen where he is, before he “surprises” them with his presence from behind my back. By the time I am back home, it is ten o’clock… on a good day.) At 3.25 pm I then hurl myself through the school gates to collect Miss Seven, before picking up Mister Three.

Though I am not naturally inclined to work at night, when I started to get pressure from a publisher to show him my book, I realised those ten hours a week were not going to be enough to get the job done. So I scrabbled around to find more time, aiming for two hours each night once the kids were in bed.

When I sent the manuscript to an agent and she urged me to have a draft ready for publishers a month ahead of the deadline I had set for myself, I squeezed out extra time on the weekends. Near the end of my ready-for-publishers draft, I was doing ten hours on Mister Three’s child-care days, two hours a night seven nights a week, and at least six hours a day on the weekends. That’s thirty-six hours I managed to steal out of my life (though it did mean I barely saw anyone except my husband and children, and them only during meal times).

 Still, though at the time I thought it would kill me, I managed to get my draft out within a reasonable amount of time.

 I have now even forgotten the promise I made to myself that I would never write a book again. It’s kind of like giving birth that way. You think to yourself, “Who would put themselves through that again?” Then you start looking at Huggies commercials and thinking, “Aren’t babies cuuute?”

So while I am waiting to begin editing my first book, I am using the spare time I have carved out of my world to begin sketching out ideas for the next one. 

 How do you make time to write?