Goodbye, Book…Don’t Forget to Write!

A little tidbit — if you’re writing a story, don’t forget to actually do it.

With as busy as we all are, it can be very easy to relegate your writing to the back burner, and then come up with any excuse not to get back to it. In that respect, being unpublished or self-published is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there’s no editor or house label breathing down your neck to crank out that next volume by a given deadline. On the other hand, having the freedom to “get to it whenever” can equal getting to it never. There’s always something — going to work, playing with the kids, taking out the garbage, et cetera. All are important things of course, so the challenge becomes working around them and still finding time to crank out a few words a day.

My crutch lately has been the Internet. I think I’m going to write, so I log into my computer, decide I’ll post a quick status update to my Facebook fan page…which becomes commenting on other posts, which leads to clicking on links, which leads to reading stories and/or remembering things I’d been meaning to look up for a long time…and before you know it, I’ve either cut my work session in half, or done away with it entirely. Promoting can cause this to happen, too. Yes, it’s good to promote your book if that’s the route you’ve chosen for your writing, but spend too much time talking about one book, and the next one just won’t happen.

This post is just a little reminder to set a few minutes aside a day to write. And yes, even a little bit makes a difference. It’s also very easy to talk yourself out of working on your manuscript today because you’re only really going to have fifteen minutes, which just isn’t enough time to make it worthwhile. Sure it is! Fifteen minutes, five hundred words…it all adds up, and before you know it your rough draft is waiting for the red pen.

And that’s just one step further towards the day you see that book with your name on it, there on the shelves.

How do you make time for writing? Please share!