Finding the time

I am in the position of being an author and having a book coming out in a few months which is very strange and fun and exciting at the same time. I still don't tell people that I am an author for some reason but when they do find out (usually because someone in my family tells them) they all, without fail, ask me how I find the time to write. They will then say something like, I would like to be a writer but I just don't have the time. I do not agree with this, but I guess I understand the sentiment. Everyone's situation is different but having a full time job working as a high school librarian can create challenges to finding time to write. 

And this is only my experience, everyone has a different experience and, in my opinion, since the invention of the mobile phone and the onslaught of distractions and information we are pummeled with every day, finding time to write can be very tricky. I'm not saying this will work for you, I'm just relaying how I carve out time to get some words down. 

I don't have a lot of time during the day. Contrary to popular belief, being a school librarian isn't sitting around reading books all day. 

My notebook has been a lifesaver. I never thought of myself as someone who would write in a notebook but in the past few years it has been my number one way to quickly jot down ideas. I don't take it everywhere but if I find myself at home I make sure it's nearby and I will write down ideas or even phrases that I like. I try to read a lot of poetry and look at a lot of art and as pompous as that might sound, it has been very influential and important to me in generating ideas. For example, I stumbled across Canadian poet Gwendolyn Macewen and her fantastic poem entitled Dark Pines Under Water and it gave me a lot of ideas regarding my main characters' motivation. I just threw down some keywords into the notebook and left them there for later.

I guess the question is, when do you transfer the ideas from the notebook to a Word doc or whatever you use. This is the tricky part and for me it does not result in sitting down and doing a long period of writing. My strategy in the past little while has been to leave my phone either turned off or in another room from a certain period of time in the evening. Again, I am lucky I can do this, some people might need to have contact with others at the ready and they cannot be far from their phone so I am aware this is not something everyone can do. In addition, I have removed some social media apps from my phone which has helped greatly. 

So in the evening, I try to sit down without my phone and get as much written down as I can. This might be two hundred words, it might be five hundred, it might be one hundred. I don't worry about it. And if I don't any words down that day I also don't get too worried at all. My goal is to seize small moments and either write down ideas in a notebook or to just write a few things down on the laptop. This might not work for everyone, some people might need a particular setting, music and surroundings to get any work done. For me, this sets me up for failure because I expect too much of myself when I create a "This is my moment to write" situation. 

That's how I do it, if I'm lucky, I get a thousand words a day, if not, it doesn't matter.  I just pick away at it when I can and when I have enough words that I'm happy with, I leave it for a month or so and then go back over it. It seems to work for me so far, and this is how I have been approaching it.