I don’t have enough time to write…

I don’t have enough time to write…says the person who spends at least 1 hour a day, 7 hours a week, 28-31 hours a month, 365 hours a year, scrolling through various social medias.

I like numbers. I can generally predict how many words (give or take 100) I can write in an hour at any given time. The amount of time I have per week to write varies dramatically, so the amount of writing I get done varies even more so.

One of my biggest challenges was overcoming the idea that I didn’t have the time to work on the stories in my head.

How many hours do you think it took for me to write Forces? At my best I can write about 1000 words per hour, I’m at my “best” only about 25% of the time. Forces was about 110,000 words. That’s 110 hours. Triple it to include editing, fussing, etc: 330. Divided by the amount days in a year (if we assume that I wrote it in a year, which I did not) that’s less than an hour a day.

So lets say, you have 1 hour a day devoted to social media scrolling. Take 30 minutes of that and put it towards writing. 30 minutes a day, and you want to write a decently sized (size doesn’t matter, btw; It’s the content and quality not the quantity) novel at 100,000 words. Let’s say you can write about 500 words in 30 minutes starting out (you won’t and can’t but this is an ideal you can reach for if you want). If you write every day for a week, you’ve written 3,500 words. If you write every day for a month: 14,000. If you write every day for 7 months: 98,000.

Lets say you can only write half at 250 in 30 minutes. It takes you about a year and a half to write 100,000 words. That’s not bad.

This obviously doesn’t include amount of time needed for plotting, planning, and reorganization. If you double the amount of time given, it might take you two-three years to write one book. Still not bad.

So why are you waiting?

Start now. 30 minutes a day. I dare you. 😁