Finding Time To Write When You Have No Time To Write!
By Karen Fenech

You’ve decided to write. Congratulations! Deciding you want to write is the first step to publication. The second step, regardless of what you want to write, fiction or nonfiction, long or short, is getting the writing done. But with all of your other commitments, how will you find the time to make this dream to write come true? 

Until recently, I was having a great deal of trouble finishing the writing projects I’d assigned myself. I sat at the kitchen table and made a list of my daily tasks, looking for places I could save time. With my pen poised above the paper, I thought: Hey, I could get Snowy, our dog, to take herself for a walk! I shifted in my seat. Uh, well, guess not.

I left the list on the table, scooped up my car keys and left the house to collect my daughter, Pamela, from school. I cross railroad tracks on the commute to and from the school she attends. On the way there in the mornings, and back to get her in the afternoons, I have to wait out a l-o-n-g train. The train takes nine or ten minutes to pass. Time I usually spent tapping the steering wheel and my feet, fiddling with the radio, and craning my neck, looking for the caboose.

On this drive, my radio failed. At the tracks, the eighteen wheeler in front of me blocked my view of anything else. There I was, stuck in my car, and for the next nine or ten minutes with absolutely no distraction! That thought flashed in my mind so bright that I wondered if a light bulb hovered above my head like a cartoon character. Here I was with absolutely nothing else clamoring for my attention! Even the clatter of the train passing made me feel wonderfully isolated. 

I snatched a pen out of my purse and the tiny notebook I use to jot down quick reminders. I had a novel I’d all but stopped working on. For the next nine minutes, I put pen to paper and wrote! 

Now, every weekday morning and afternoon, I use the time waiting out that train to write. But more, since then, I look for other places in my day where I can write. And I find them!

Yesterday, I found twenty minutes while waiting my turn at the dentist’s office. Standing in line at the deli counter netted me another ten minutes. 

Part of my problem with getting my writing done was that I wouldn’t write unless I could reserve a big block of time to do it. I rarely could do that, so I didn’t write at all.

Once I stopped thinking in terms of hours-- and started thinking in minutes-- I got my writing done.

Where else can you snag some writing time? On the bus or train to and from work? Instead of a candy bar break? Write! Your waistline will thank you, and you’ll have the added reward of seeing your writing pages stack up. 

Before, I’d fume over wasting time waiting in lineups or in traffic; now I reach for my notepad. Not the palm-sized thing I keep in my purse. Now, I tote around a handy 9"x 6" spiral bound notebook. You never know when ten minutes could turn into an hour. Last month, I was left in my doctor’s examination room with a thermometer in my mouth, while she dashed out to attend another patient who’d gone into labor.

I never did find out if that woman had a boy or a girl, but by the time my doctor returned, I had a chapter! 

Karen Fenech lives with her husband and daughter. Her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Storyteller Magazine and Canadian Writer's Journal. Her romantic suspense novel Unholy Angels (Port Town Publishing) was released in February 2004. In the story, Liz Janssen is targeted by a homicidal cult that has recruited her troubled teenaged son to kill her. She must save them both and do so in secret from Doug, her cop-lover-- a man who is tormented by his past and who will stop at nothing and spare no one, including Liz's son, to stop the cult's leader. To read an excerpt go to http://www.porttownpublishing.bigstep.com/generic70.html. Unholy Angels is available by special order at bookstores (ISBN 1594660158), online at amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594660158/ and at amazon.ca at http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594660158/. Write to Karen at fenechk@hotmail.com. Visit Karen's website at  www.karenfenech.com.