Between the Cracks

A common complaint about writing is time. As in, ‘I haven’t enough time’. Yet, I bet if I sat you down and audited your day I could find moments, I could find minutes that add up to a sizeable chunk of time. Let’s start with lunch, so many British people eat their lunch at their work desk, it always ends up with them doing work but it is something that can easily be broken by setting a routine in which you go somewhere else and…write. You can still eat but eat away from boss who may ask you to do something. We fought hard in this country to get a lunch and so many of us are now giving them up believing we will get home earlier. Not many of us do. So, that’s a possible sixty minutes or if you have to walk there and back, possibly forty minutes with twenty minutes of thinking. If you’re on public transport then a notebook is your best friend, you could plot or map a story. Again, add up all that time on the bus and train over a working week. I bet some of you are in double digits for that.

Then there is the moment where you say you are winding down. As in, ‘It’s been a long day, I’m just watching this to wind down’ but you’re basically watching shit whilst not watching shit as you are on social media or your mobile or playing a game etc. It’s not good for the brain to do these types of things, it lowers are ability to concentrate and that impacts on the way you work. Writing is as much about creativity as it is about routine. If you state that you will write in these cracks that sit between work and home, between TV and the mobile phone, you will write something. It will be awful but you can work with awful. Awful can be made better. Nothing can’t be made into anything. To give you an idea of what can be written, I wrote this is fourteen minutes, it’s my down time between writing a story and going back to that story to do some more. Stop making excuses, write.