If you love something, you'll dedicate yourself to it. But you still have to work and live. Here's how I made room for my passion in a busy schedule.
I came up with my book idea when I was 12. For years, I wanted to write this book, but every time I started, life and school and work always seemed to get in the way. Allow me to flex for a second—I earned 4 degrees in 7 years and worked 1-3 jobs during each one of them. During that time, you can imagine what my schedule was like. My whole life centered around weirdly-scheduled classes, work, and homework. During school, I told myself that I would write as soon as I finally graduated. I thought life would change once I had finally finished school for good, but surprise surprise—it didn’t. I went from a chaotic school-work schedule, to a routine but grueling work-commuter schedule.
As work started taking over, I quickly realized that my dream of writing my book could easily get buried by life, except this time, there would be no end date. That wasn't acceptable to me. So, in 2018, I came up with a year-long writing challenge to get my first draft done. If you’ve always wanted to write a book, but you’ve been thinking that you don’t have the time and it’s impossible, I’m telling you now that it’s not. It’s hard, but I promise it’s doable. Here are some things I did that helped me get my first draft done!
#1 I Wrote Every Single Day
I fought against this advice for years. I don't have time, I said, and there was some truth to that.
Once I started my career, I struggled to wake up every day between 5 and 6 a.m. I showered and did my hair (this fro is not easy), got dressed, cleaned my room, and sometimes grabbed something to scarf down. If I pulled out of the driveway at exactly 7 a.m., then I made the 7:26 a.m. train by the skin of my teeth, but if I pulled out a minute after 7, then I missed that train and had to wait for the 7:56 a.m. train. Either way, I had an hour-long train ride into New York Penn, which I spent either eating my grabbed breakfast so that I wouldn’t get sick or pulling out my laptop to do work. At Penn Station, I took a daily gamble on which trains would be running and walked the 5-10 minutes to the 1,2,3 trains or the A,C trains. The subway ride was about 20 minutes to downtown. Then I walked the remaining 10-15 minutes to make it to work by 9 or 9:30 a.m. Many times, I was the first one in the office. Almost always, I was the last one out. The partners of my firm really put emphasis on being able to make it home for dinner, so usually they left around 5 p.m. I, however, stayed until 6 or sometimes much later than 7 p.m. Because I never managed leaving at a specific time, I was beholden to whatever train or bus I could catch back home, usually turning my two-hour morning commute into a three-hour night commute. And as my fellow commuters know, more often than not, the trains and buses that I needed were broken down, delayed, or out of commission entirely. In the first month of my career, my train line was disrupted or delayed for three weeks straight. With no car of my own, it took me 5 hours to get home multiple times. When I did get home, I ate whatever my mother had left out for me. Then, I took a shower and got in bed to do it all over again. Literally, rinse. Repeat.
Sound familiar? (Big hugs to everyone commuting into NYC). Do you think I had time to write in all that?
Turns out, I did. It wasn’t easy, but I absolutely did. The caveat was: I didn't have a lot of time to write. The key to writing every day was finding the pockets of time when I could. When I really looked at my schedule, I had plenty of transition moments of which I could take advantage. The first time I wrote, it was on a whim. I pulled out my journal one day on that first morning train, and later realized I could take that hour-long ride and make it writing time. I was barely getting real work done during that time anyway.
Now, once I found that time, it didn’t stick every day. Sometimes I had to answer emails on the train. Sometimes there was no train, and I was too busy trying to find a new train station. On days like that, I made a mental note to find time later. And I stuck to it. Why? Because I couldn’t afford to ruin my streak!
If you really commit to it, eventually you won’t want to mess up your 7-day, or 52-day, or 134-day streak. When I couldn’t write on the train, I wrote on sticky notes in between work calls. I wrote in my phone as I walked to lunch. If I went all day without writing, the first thing I did when I came home was put my journal on my pillow. Some nights I fell asleep next to it, but by then the habit was so ingrained that I would wake up around 11:50 p.m., roll over, and write anything, just to make the goal that day.
The point is, find the time to make this a habit. Make the time. It’s there. If you have to drive to work, leave a journal in your car. Before you pull off or get out, or after you’ve seen the kids safely inside the school, pull out your journal and write. If you spend the first 30 minutes after you wake up scrolling through your phone, exchange Twitter for the Notes app. While you’re standing there watching your Kuerig make you coffee, write. If the only time you have to yourself is when you’re sitting on the toilet, write on the toilet. I did!
This is age-old advice for a reason. It works. If you want to learn anything, consistency is key. If you want to get good at something, you have to practice. If you want to write a book, you have to write. Consistently.
The quicker you make writing a habit, the easier it will be to actually do it. The easier it is to actually do it, the more you’ll want to do it. The more you do it, the more progress you’ll see. If you write every day, eventually you have to end up with a book, right? That’s just math or physics or something.
#2 Don’t Get It Twisted—The Goal Was Only One Word a Day
Now, when I was writing at 11:50 p.m. to make my goal, was I writing whole passages and chapters?
No.
I know that sometimes, maybe even most times, you’re going to have to squeeze in your writing. I did too. I quickly learned that lofty dreams of writing a chapter a day were not going to work for me. Instead, I broke my goal down into teeny tiny, bite size pieces. I had one goal: to write one word every day.
One word. Just one. Sometimes that word was just my character’s name. Sometimes that word was literally “and” placed in the middle of a sentence. A lot of times, the one word I wrote at midnight was so illegible that by the next morning I had no idea what I wrote. None of that mattered. All I cared about was being able to say I wrote each day.
Why did that work? Progressing in such small pieces was hard, but it also took the guilt out of writing. Instead of feeling bad that I couldn’t write a whole scene in one day, I celebrated the fact that I kept the marathon going. Writing just one word also meant that the story was always on my mind. If your goal is to write a book, you’re not just throwing words at a page. There’s a purpose. Even if I didn’t have time to fully dive back into my story, my one-word goal meant that I was always trying to find the next word that would finish the sentence or paragraph I had written before. With one word, I was always moving forward, and if I was stuck, that one word allowed me to get the writing out of the way so that I could think through why I was stuck. On the days that I was able to write more than one word, I felt so good I would usually find myself writing in other stolen moments throughout the day because my mind was already flowing.
Do you think you can write one word every day? I bet you can. At that pace, will you finish your book in one month? No, but who cares? We’d probably prefer to be a wiser version of the hare in the story, but even if the tortoise hadn’t won, he still would have finished the race. The point is to run, no matter how slowly. Put one foot in front of the other. Write one word every day. When you look over your shoulder, you will see how far you’ve come.
#3 I Found People To Be Accountable To
This was one of the hardest parts for me, but it was crucial.
Once a draft started coming together, I got stuck at the beginning of the book. I had always struggled with beginnings. What happens in the end, I got it! The middle—I’ve kind of got that too. But how the story gets started? No idea. After 6 months of writing, it was getting harder and harder to avoid writing the beginning chapters. I could feel the writer’s block coming on. Worse, I could feel the discouragement and self-doubt coming.
I was really scared of giving up on myself, so I took a dive off the deep end. The only people who had ever heard my book idea were my little sister and my mom. I used to tell them everything I ever wanted to write, but I had been waiting to write this book for so long that my two biggest cheerleaders had eventually both refused to hear any more of my ideas until I had something written for them. That meant I couldn’t give them one chapter at a time. They were waiting for a full draft. I knew that they were waiting, but since that hadn’t propelled me enough, I decided I needed even more accountability.
In hindsight, I went a bit extreme. I told 11 other friends and family members that I was writing a book and asked them to read it. I told them that in November (11 months after I had started writing), I would personally deliver a draft to each of them and then scheduled a group feedback session for after the new year. It was all planned out. I was super excited. Then reality set in.
When I set that deadline, everything kicked into high gear. I wasn’t just writing for myself anymore. Now, I needed to have a full story in other people’s hands. When I looked at all the work I had done thus far, I realized I hadn’t fully connected my scenes, and I still didn’t have a solid beginning. I had personally invited 13 people to judge me on my life’s work, and I didn’t even have a book. The four months after I set that deadline, I wrote my little ass off. Every free moment that I had was dedicated to getting my book done. I had to push back the deadline by two weeks because I still couldn’t come up with a beginning, but in November, I finished my first draft and handed it off. It was absolutely terrifying.
Was my first draft good? No. Did all 13 of my readers read the whole 800-page book? Of course not, they couldn’t even get through it.
None of that is important. The accountability was the last push I needed to get my first draft finished. After wanting to write my book for 15 years, I had finally done it in one year. Now that I think about it, it was wild to give my first draft to so many people, but I had chosen wisely. They were all people who were close to me, and most importantly, people I trusted to hold me to my word and tell me the truth. At the end of the feedback session, all 13 of my readers, my friends and family, looked me in my face and told me to do better. Because they knew I could. With the first draft done, and all my ideas in one place, I knew I could too.
Eventually doubt and self-consciousness does set in. If you find yourself slowing down or getting stuck, try asking for someone’s help. If you told people in your life that you were writing a book, I have a feeling they’d be pretty excited for you. If you asked one of them to hold you accountable to a deadline, I bet someone would be more than happy to help. My only caveat: choose someone you love and trust, and if you’re not ready to share with friends and family, find a coach (like me!) to help you get through it. Many of us are writing a book to share it. Why not harness that power to help you accomplish one of your goals?
So, what about you? Do you have a book you've been waiting to write? Leave a comment to let me know what obstacles are in your way, and let's brainstorm how to get you around them.
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