If you want to write a book, you have to carve out the time for it. Which brings me to the third thought – Spend your time, don’t waste it. And I promise you that pretty soon, that sentence will turn into a paragraph, those paragraphs will become pages, and those pages will become your book. But I know that you can write a sentence a day. You have a job, you have a spouse, you have kids – I get it. Not to traffic in clichés like “A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step” – but it does. The key to writing a book when you can’t write full-time is to not try to write a book. Do the math: if you write a single page a day, you have a book in about a year. Maybe one page is a more reasonable goal. (The first 15 publishers I sent it to disagreed, but the 16th bought it. I wrote in tents, hotels rooms on trains and planes. I wrote early in the morning and late at night. I promised myself that I’d write five pages a day no matter what. I was, and am, a big fan of Wambaugh’s, and I thought, “I can’t write 10 pages a day, but I can write five.” He was a Los Angeles homicide detective who wanted to be a writer, so he decided to write 10 pages a day, no matter what. I was working as a safari guide (photographic safaris, thank you), trying to make a living, not getting my first book written, when I heard a radio interview with the great Joseph Wambaugh. If you set unrealistic goals, you’ll fail and become discouraged. So, second, set reasonable, doable goals. Then promise yourself you’re going to do it anyway.ĭon’t worry, we’re about to get practical.
Acknowledge the realities of your situation. It happened for me, it happened for a bunch of people I know. “How am I supposed to find time to write?! I’m just kidding myself.
It’s easy to look at your circumstances and throw your hands up. Maybe you’re raising a family, so when you get home your hours are more than full, your energy is depleted.
#Writefull books full
It’s daunting, isn’t it? You’re putting in full days on the job to put food on the table, pay the rent or that mortgage. If that’s you, I have a few thoughts about how you can write your book.īestselling author Don Winslow says the key to writing a book when you can’t write full-time is to ‘spend’ time, not ‘kill’ it. Any number of good novels, some of them bestsellers, were written by people who were holding down full-time jobs. I was seven published books into my writing career before I could support myself as a writer, and I know several prominent authors who were in the same situation. Not to kill the suspense here, but the answer is, “Yes.” A resounding yes. If you can’t write full-time, can you still write a book?
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