Friday, July 27, 2012

Claiming and creating your writing time.

A year or so ago, I got a chance to read and comment on an advance copy of Sage Cohen's book, The Productive Writer. It's a great little book of tips and tools for all kinds of writers. And I was reading through it the other day, I came upon this sentence: "It's up to create your writing time, to claim it."

The universe doesn't always open up with scads of time to write or do other creative work. Most of us go on  having to make a living, care for our families and ourselves, exercise, do laundry, run errands--all the stuff of life, which most of us know only too well will fill all available time. At the same time, writing is very hard work, often emotionally hard, often terribly emotionally hard, and so it is so easy to find other things that are easier to do or seem more important, especially when others are urging you to do them, expecting you to do them, or wanting to do them with you.

Only we can make writing a priority, and not just a verbalized priority ("Writing is important to me") but a lived priority, finding time most days to write new poems or continue to work on a novel or outline a new screenplay. And the more often we claim the time, the easier it is to create it. What time can you claim today to get into your project?