MOST WRITERS have day jobs. That’s a fact. There are those who begin writing in earnest after retirement or who are fortunate enough to be supported by other means or who manage to carve out a writing career when they are young, but these are the minorityIf you have a day job and a young family, opportunities to write are even more precious. Yet while having to work full-time and deal with family responsibilities slows down your writing progress, it doesn’t need to stop you from achieving your writing goals, whether those goals include journaling regularly, writing essay, fiction, poetry, or memoir.
Of course, every working writer needs to deal with this challenge in his or her own way, depending upon circumstances and temperament. For example, even though I’m naturally a night owl, my day job requires a great deal of creative energy and I have a long commute, so by the time I arrive home in the evening I’m pretty much toast, creatively speaking. In addition, I write blog posts, teach online classes, and coach a limited number of writing clients. With such a full life, it has been extremely difficult to make time for my own creative writing.
My solution has been to make my writing goals modest and doable — and to learn how to be a morning person. If I net 100 solid words each day (and some days I achieve more than that), I have 36,500 words at the end of the year. That’s half a book, eighteen 2000-word essays, or about 73 poems.And though I restrict my scheduled writing time to weekdays because weekends are filled with family and other responsibilities, I do sneak in some weekend writing when I can. But I don’t beat myself up if that doesn’t happen. I’m not perfect, and this is not a perfect system, but I’m sticking with it and making progress.
