“One thing about writing is that it takes time.”  – M.F.K. Fisher

Thank you for all your comments last week. Finding time to write really seemed to hit a nerve. (Click on Comment below and you can read all the infinite variety of scheduling writing time sent in by readers.) 

I calmed down this week and got my writing done – or at least some writing done and that’s all anybody can do.  The important thing is not to let time drift by and eventually not write at all.  Instead you have to keep wrestling or tinkering with your own schedule.  Most of our lives are always in flux so your fall writing schedule might be very different than your summer schedule.

One summer when my daughters were about nine and ten, I had a book deadline and figured that if they slept late I could get a morning’s worth of writing done everyday. To sleep late, they obviously had to stay up late, so they had no bedtime. Visiting their grandparents later that summer, my girls told them, “Oh, Mom lets us stay up all night if we want to.”  My parents were shocked and asked me what kind of a mother lets her kids stay up all night? A writer mother, I told them. 

“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”  – Stephen King

Whenever I say to my students that I’m going to tell them how to become writers they whip out their notebooks like I’m about to say something really profound, and here’s what I tell them: 1. Read  2. Write.  That’s it.  You need to find the best teachers in the world – other writers, the writers you love. And you need to write, practice your writing the same way you’d practice learning how to lay bricks or to become a basketball player. (I think I’ve said this in other posts but even though it’s pretty obvious it’s worth repeating. Like the one word e-mail messages my friend Bonnie’s sends me on occasion: “Breathe” she writes.)

A Question: As for finding time for reading, when do you read?  How do you fit reading into your life?  And what book(s) are you reading right now?  Please click on the Comment button below and let us know.

Oh, yes, and Breathe.

To Do: Write the book jacket copy of the book you’re writing or would like to write.  (An editor had me do this once when I started wondering in the middle of a novel and didn’t know where I was going.) Check out the jacket copy of the book you’re reading now – (or the back of the book if it’s a paperback.) You’ll find a synapses of what the book’s about and the theme. Also some glowing words about why you should read it. Don’t forget to include your own glowing words in the description of your book.