How do you find the time to write?

I get asked this question a lot. I think it's a really important one for all sorts of writers, because unless you're a self-supporting full-time writer, you've always got something else going on. Maybe it's your day job. Maybe it's running a household and/or raising children, doing volunteer work, etc. (as it is for me). Maybe you're in school and at the whim of the school year, meeting everyone else's demands while trying to maintain your own goals.

Believe me, it can be hard.

In the end, the way you write is up to you (because who else understands your needs better?) - but I thought I'd share some things I have learned in the process of trying to balance full-time motherhood with writing.

1. Write when you can. Don't figure that it's a waste of time to start if you only have fifteen minutes, because if the Muse is on your side, those fifteen minutes could be gold. Over time, you can train yourself to improve your readiness for short stints like this.
2. Stick up for your writing time. One of the most important things in getting writing done is making sure that you - and as many people as possible around you - consider your writing a priority. If you don't insist that it be included in planning, it generally won't, and then the "gas law of activities" will most likely force you to covert writing stints or extremely late nights and exhaustion.
3. Write when you can't. Thinking counts too! If it's impossible for you to access a computer or even a notepad for several hours, play around with the story in your head. You can work on plot, character, planning, and even words this way. Store it up and get ready to let the fingers fly the next time you get time alone. This is also a great way to make sure you're getting exercise, because using your body gives your brain a great opportunity to play.
   
4. Watch out for distractions. Everyone is different, but I can't write (at least, I can't write new material) when the television is on, or when I'm listening to certain kinds of music. The fact is that the TV is a devourer of time, and you can lose two hours before you even realize it. Most often when people ask me how I can get so much done, I simply say, "I don't watch TV." This isn't strictly true - but I never ever turn on the TV for myself. I watch it with my kids, or when my husband is already watching. Yes, so I miss out on stuff, but I can always pick it up on DVD later and plan a time to watch. Activities that allow you to think are good; ones that fill your mind with fluff are bad. And you might be able to edit during a busy time even if you can't create.
   
5. Seek out inspiration. This is somewhat the reverse of #4 above. Take your writer's eye with you everywhere. Read books in your field, or watch television and movies that stimulate your writer's vision - none of that is wasted time.
6. Consider having goals. If you're in a really tough period - like that sleepless one I had for about a year after each of my kids was born - goals can be more demoralizing than helpful, so be careful with this one (see #7 below). However, I've found that having a loosely held goal rate keeps me from forgetting about the task at hand. A chapter a week. Or just a scene. A sentence. Or just "I'll think about it sometime today," if you're in a storm and need to keep the hatches battened down. I find I feel happier and get more done when my writing is a constant presence in my life.
   
7. Be patient with yourself. Keep in mind that every bit of your effort counts for something. Even just a few words that all seem wrong are helping you better understand what you'd prefer to do next time. Even a few stray thoughts that you can't properly remember are likely to contribute to your subconscious vision for a story. Frustration is normal, but don't chastise yourself for getting nothing done, or for getting less done than you'd hoped - that will most likely lead to you stopping altogether and waiting for a "time when I'm not busy." There is never a time when I'm not busy. So if I have to set my ideal schedule back by a week or two, I try to do so while saying to myself, "Well, there's always next week." Furthermore, there's no point in whipping yourself if you sit down at the computer and no words come out. Try to send your thoughts in another direction, or better yet, walk away from the scene and go for a walk where you can breathe fresh air and look at trees while you think.
8. Believe in yourself and in what you're trying to achieve. Remember that it is worthwhile. Writing is a noble calling, and a beautiful one. It is engrossing and enthralling. Yes, it's also hard, but this is a classic case of a skill best developed through practice, and through seeking out opportunities to learn and grow.

It's something to think about.

Culture Share: Canada - Time as a measurement of distance

This post is part of The Writer's International Culture Share, in which writers discuss their personal experience with world cultures: Heidi Vlach discusses time as a measurement of distance in Canada.


Time as a measurement of distance in Canada by Heidi Vlach

For a lot of Canadians, an hour is a measurement of distance. Technically impossible, but it's true.

I hadn't thought it was strange until I had to explain it a few times to visiting Europeans. Canada is the second largest country in the world, with a population of only 35 million people peppered across all this space. Major cities are hundreds of kilometres away from each other. Practically speaking, exact distance to a destination doesn't matter -- it only matters how long the travel will take. So while the road signs say that Sudbury is 386 kilometres away from Toronto, most people here will tell you that Toronto is "four hours" away. That's approximately how long it'll take to drive 386 kilometres, after all. Why nitpick?

But it runs deeper than that. Metric measurement is the official Canadian standard (hence all the road signs giving kilometre measurements). That standard was only introduced in 1971 and it wasn't unanimously supported. Many older adults are more comfortable with imperial units -- the units they grew up learning. Ask an anglophone Canadian their height and they'll probably give you a feet-and-inches measure. Changing the national standard of measure doesn't happen overnight. Even now, many product labels still list two forms of measurements (e.g. millilitres and ounces), in the same way labels are written in both national languages, English and French. Just because metric is the technical standard doesn't mean everyone needs to be forced to use it in daily life.

Because of this, I grew up with my teachers using metric (mostly) and my family using imperial (mostly). A lot of American media spills over the border, so American TV shows added to my tendency to use imperial. I prefer nice logical centimetres if I'm measuring out a sewing project, but if I look at a person to guess their height, I understand it much better in the "five foot however-many-inches" terminology I hear on a daily basis. I wasn't taught a standard system so much as I was taught a particular state of cultural shift.

Many people of my generation show their cultural shift in the same centimeters-and-feet pattern as me, and I've never known an older adult to find it strange. Like a lot of things in the Canadian mosaic culture, measurement units are mostly a matter of personal preference. And if a Canadian doesn't remember exactly how far 100 kilometres is, they probably at least know the kilometers-to-miles ratio they need to estimate the answer. Everyone manages to get along and not sweat the details too much.

So I'm fairly sure hours are used to measure distance because that allows all Canadians an easy compromise. Everyone knows how long an hour is. And unless you drive at an unusual speed, everyone takes approximately four hours to travel from Sudbury to Toronto. With that out of the way, we can all get back to discussing the weather.

Heidi C. Vlach lives in northern Ontario, Canada.

Who they are, and how to get them there at the right time...

Do you struggle with story logistics the way I do? When I say "story logistics," I mean places in a story where in order for something critical to happen for the plot, you've got to

1. introduce a bunch of people, or
2. move someone or something or some group of people from one place to another, or
3. have a bunch of time go by.

It drives me crazy. You have to do this stuff, yet it's dreadfully hard to make it happen without having it devolve into a bunch of "telling" (oooh, not telling!). The fact is, you'd rather just jump to the fun exciting part and make it happen without having to worry about it (unless the quest is the thing).

But you do have to worry about it.

I find that there's often a tradeoff, as in the chapter I'm writing now. Character N gets a piece of news, then has to gather his friends and go off somewhere to act on that news. The real action and excitement are in the action on the news, so I tried to avoid moving a bunch of people from one place to another and having a lot of time go by - but when I tried to start writing it there, it didn't work.

The problem was with the characters. This story has quite a lot of characters, and in this chapter I land readers right in the midst of a pocket filled with heretofore unfamiliar ones. Sure, we've seen them before from afar, but now we're in the point of view of an insider to the group - and he'd know each of them personally. If I tried to start at the point where the action was most exciting, I'd have to detract from that very action by working through a very ugly and clunky list of characters, who would then be difficult to keep track of as the story went on.

After some thinking I decided to do it the other way. To give them the time, and to see if I can move over their travel relatively quickly and smoothly on the way to the main action. If I include the time and the travel, then it gives me room to introduce the necessary characters and have them be distinct from one another. It also gives me time to do more things that I love to do: to show more about the point of view character and the difficulties he has in getting things done; to dive into the social dynamic of this group and explore the push and pull of how it hangs together. N has to go and get his best friend first, and then the group's fastest runner, who is also the most loyal group member - and at that point they discuss who else in the group they need before gathering them and going off for the big to-do. It sets up information that some group members don't know, which adds tension going forward, and allows for a gradual increase in tension and overall emotional dynamics.

The decision for me isn't always clear-cut. In this case, the advantages of the logistical delay outweighed the disadvantages. It's something worth thinking about the next time you slap your own forehead and say, "How the heck am I going to get them there?"

A Sense of Time

Are you one of those kinds of people who can't go anywhere without a watch? My husband is; I used to be that way, until I lost my watch once. Then I realized that if you're looking around, you can almost always find a clock somewhere. Of course, this may put you in the situation where you can't find one and you have to ask someone for the time. As I'm not shy, that's not really a problem.

The sense of time changes over the course of one's life. I remember feeling like a class I disliked in elementary school was going to last forever. Now I can guess pretty accurately when five or ten or twenty minutes have gone by. I've even heard that this has been studied scientifically, and it really does change.

It's not only the internal clock that gives you a sense of time, though. It's events. This is where you can start putting on the worldbuilding glasses if you like. I spent so long listening to school bells that I still get an adrenaline rush when I hear the bells at my son's school and feel I might be late. School years versus summers have always divided my life, because my parents work in the university setting. A working life, though, perhaps that's measured differently. Holidays mark time in our lives. Birthdays. Once I was an adult, though, I found that it became harder to remember which gift came from a year ago, and which from three years ago. Gee, I thought, time is running together!

And then I had kids.

Kids change your sense of time like nothing I've ever experienced. When my son was born he used to nurse for 45 minutes every two hours, twenty-four hours a day. For a straight month, there was no day and no night, only this endless sequence of feedings and attempts at sleep. I had to restart everything. Once I had day and night again, I found that minutes would creep by. I'd struggle to get through the last ten minutes before my husband got home, for example. Hours would feel interminable. Yet at the same time, the weeks would fly by. It's that funny feeling where you're so busy you can hardly breathe, but at the end of the day you can't really identify a single thing you did.

The clock-style life is treated differently by different groups (the California party-goers who are always half an hour late, the BART trains which are usually within 2-3 minutes of on time, the Japanese trains which run brutally on time and some of which come every 45 seconds during rush hour, etc.). But it's not the only one. I think about farming families who used to wake with the sun and go to sleep with it, and whose years are measured by temperature, frost and season.

There are also different ways of measuring time. This whole clock thing is convenient, but the clock, and its "clockwise" - turning hands were decided upon by consensus at one point. In ancient Japan they didn't use the same hours we do, but would measure time according to slightly larger blocks named for animals - "the hour of the ox", for example. So when you're designing your world, don't feel you're restricted. Pick a cultural and environmental reason for the way your people measure time.

Wikipedia has a great entry ("Second") which links the current measurement of our seconds to fluctuations in the element cesium. I once decided to create a time measurement system that was influenced by binary calculations, with 64 seconds in a minute and 64 minutes in an hour, all of that measured on the basis of the observable movement of a nearby star.

There are lots of options, but for now I'm out of time. :-)