Most writing advice for adults includes setting a routine that blocks out time for writing. If your brain knows that on Wednesdays at 10 am after you’ve taken the kids to school and the dog for a walk and gotten your second cup of coffee, it’s time to write, then you can pretty reliably expect your brain to “get in the zone” and let you write. So that works. And my streaming was definitely doing that for me, although I’ve been having trouble finding a time lately that consistently works. But, for a lot of people, especially in a gig economy, that won’t work.
Right now my schedule isn’t very consistent. For income, I’m tutoring and (when I can get hours) adjuncting. Neither of these are stable. I’ve got something like four creative projects I’m juggling and, oh yeah, I’ve decided to start a small business (estimated launch in July). Add to that family obligations that are also constantly fluctuating and the fact that I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in over a decade for medical reasons, and, no, I can’t rely on routine to get my writing done, not all the time.
Maybe you can relate. Maybe you’ve got kids who have unpredicatable sports schedules. Maybe you have to take a family member to cancer treatments. Maybe you are a kid, like my tutoring students, who has to depend on parents for rides and can’t predict homework loads from one week to the next. Maybe you drive Uber to make ends meet because your main job isn’t giving you consistent hours. Maybe you work retail and your schedule changes by the week because for some reason retail managers are told that’s a good idea. There’s a thousand reasons why someone’s schedule might not be consistent enough to build a solid writing routine.
But that does not mean you can’t write.
I’ve been using Gail Carson Levine’s excellent writing advice book Writing Magic to help my tutor students with creative writing projects. It’s written for middle grade kids, and it’s brilliant, and it’s reminded me how I managed to be so prolific when I was a teenager.
Among her excellent advice is to keep a notepad (or, in a digital world, a tablet or even a smartphone) with you and write in the small moments. When you’re in the waiting room at the hospital. When you’re waiting for a ride home. When you’re in the in-between spaces. If you use Google Docs or Microsoft’s OneDrive to save your work, it saves as you write, and that works great for these small moments.
In some ways this works better for kids, who are frequently having to wait: they have to wait for their parents to pick them up, they have to wait for class to start, they have to wait between activities, they have to sit on the bus for a while as they go from place to place, they have to wait for their peers to finish their work before the class can move on, etc. All those times when we adults are rushing around to take care of them, they’re often waiting. One of the biggest time sinks I’ve noticed as an adult is that all that time I was waiting for rides and being driven around, I’m now driving.
I can’t write during my long commutes, unfortunately. I’m not comfortable with speech-to-text dictation software, so I can’t do that. If you are, then you can write on your commute. I can, howeveer, read on my commute, which sustains the writing, because audiobooks work well when you’re driving. If you carpool, you can write in the car more easily when it’s not your turn to drive. (I’m looking forward to when, sometime next year, my local light rail station opens up and I’m able to drive less so I can think more; it’ll be a longer commute, but I’ll actually feel like I have more time, since I can use the time to read, write, knit, etc.)
However, I can write in other small spaces of time. Right now I’m chilling at a library writing this in between other obligations. I’ve been sneaking in writing at work while my students are doing exercises, which I think isn’t a bad thing, because I’m modeling a good use of time (and only doing that when I’ve got my lessons in good order, of course). I find revision very relaxing, so I often do that before bed for a few minutes.
It all adds up. Sure, large blocks of two hours at a time are my preference. But ten minutes here and five minutes there… it adds up to hours over time, and sometimes you just can’t block out large pieces of time. Dinners need to be made, family members need rides, floors need vacuumed, dishes need done and done and done, laundry needs moved. These things allow for small chunks of idle time between tasks. A tablet or a notebook don’t take the same amount of settling-in time that a laptop or a desktop computer might, so maybe those are best for the small moments.
At any rate, don’t dismiss the utililty of small moments. Just five or ten minutes of writing is better than no writing at all.
Dr. Cox's Desk 