Leanne Phillips

Paula Huston, author of Daughters of Song and The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life, has an interesting perspective on the idea of making time to write. “Don’t,” she says.

Paula lives in the next town over and gave a workshop several years ago at a local writer’s conference I attended. What she had to say forever changed the way I look at my writing schedule.

Paula’s advice was to stop putting everything else first and fitting writing in where you can, a practice which often leaves a writer with little or no time to actually write. Instead, she said, writing should be the main focus. It’s the other stuff, things like cooking, cleaning, gardening and PTA meetings, that’s unnecessary.

Paula also recommended learning to say no to things that are not truly important to you and that don’t further your goals. Simplify your life, cut back on activities that are not adding to your life and focus your energies on writing. Don’t do things that really are not important to you out of a sense of obligation.

Don’t make time for writing. Turn that notion on it’s head: If writing is your passion, then make writing the center of your life, and when you feel like it, make time for all the other stuff.

My writing day is filled with interruptions, most of them welcomed, but interruptions nonetheless. From the telephone ringing, to e-mails and instant messages, to checking in on writing message boards and job listings, to the sudden thought that I need to run the mail downstairs before the mailman comes–the interruptions are constant and never-ending.

As a writer, it is important to set aside uninterrupted writing time each day. I find my writing day goes much more smoothly when I turn the telephone ringer off, let the answering machine pick up, shut off the e-mail notifications, let messages pile up in my in-box for just a bit, and focus totally and completely on my writing, even if it’s only for a couple of hours.

When I am interrupted, it is not just the moment of the interruption that is at stake. It is several moments afterward as well, the moments it takes me to remember where I was, to get my mind back to that magical place, and to pick up where I left off.

If you are a writer and you want to increase your productivity, I highly recommend giving yourself uninterrupted writing time each day. Set aside time for answering telephone calls, answering e-mail and running errands, but let your writing time be totally and completely your writing time.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, when I feel that I don’t have enough time in my life to write as much as I’d like: The thing is, I do write. I write a lot, each and every day.

In addition to paid writing, I write blog entries and journal entries, I respond to e-mails from friends and posts on community message boards to which I belong. I post messages and respond to messages in a couple of professional groups. Writing today is not the solitary profession it once was, and by networking and sharing information through e-mail loops and groups and writing forums, I’ve learned a great deal, and more rapidly than I would have been able to do if left to my own devices.

But I’m wondering lately how many words I really do write every day. If I added up the words in every e-mail, every post, every blog and journal entry, every letter to a friend, every update on Twitter or MySpace or Facebook, I think I’d have easily written the entire Harry Potter series by now. It’s something to consider.

One of my favorite credos is from The Four Agreements, by don Miguel Ruiz, who writes that, among other things, we should be impeccable with our word. I’ve always taken that to mean to speak truthfully and kindly and fairly. Now, I’m wondering whether being impeccable with our word might also mean to value our words, to use them well, not to fritter them away. At the end of my life, what percentage of the words I’ve written and said will I wish I could take back and redistribute to better use?

Before I started writing regularly, I used to be afraid that I would run out of words, that I would not have enough to say. I think that fear is one of the things that kept me from beginning.

Having spent 20 years working in the legal field, being analytical and logical. I was afraid, too, that all of this left-brained thinking had ruined my ability to be creative. I was afraid that, when I sat down to write, the words would not come, and the words that did come would not be creative, but logical and dead and boring.

Frankly, my fears were not unwarranted. It was hard to get started. I couldn’t think of anything to write about. I took to carrying a tiny notebook with me, so I could write down the ideas as they came to me. This is something I heard about from another writer. The notebook did come in handy–it was gradually filled with reminders about dental appointments and shopping lists.

Once I sat down to write, getting the words to come out was difficult. I was becoming more and more convinced that, during the years I hadn’t been writing, my writing muscle and my coming-up-with-ideas-for-things-to-write-about muscle had completely atrophied. But I kept at it, and I kept carrying the notebook around, and one day, it was if the floodgates opened.

I was trying to come up with ideas for a blog I was working on in connection with a travel website. I was browsing in a book store, not really thinking about it, when the ideas started to come. I jotted down one idea, then a couple more, and suddenly the ideas kept coming and coming. I even tried to shut it off at one point, so I could continue with my browsing. But I finally had to give in to it, sit down at a table and write out page after page after page of ideas.

Writing, thinking, being creative, ideas…those things are like muscles. If we don’t use them, they may hide away for awhile, but they are always there for us to use. I’ve found that, if you keep at it, if you keep thinking and keep writing and keep trying, you will work those muscles and they, in turn, will begin to work for you again.