Everybody has the same advice if you want to accomplish any sort of major creative endeavor, whether it’s becoming a published author or creating award-winning macrame projects. The advice is Make it a part of your routine. I’m going to focus on establishing a writing routine here, but some of this advice is good for any kind of creative project.
The first thing you need to do is take a realistic look at your schedule and figure out when you have the time to devote yourself to a creative project. It would be great to take a week at a time and plot it out at once. Here’s the thing, you also need to consider when your brain is most capable of doing creative work. If you decide to work from 10-12 pm every day, but your brain really wants to shut down at that time, then it is not a good choice of time. You can’t brute force this. There are things you can do to get your brain in shape for work, but don’t force yourself to work at a time that isn’t good for you. Something will break. That something might be you. For me, I found I do my best creative work between 11am and 5pm.
Finding 20 minutes to do really good work, is preferable to finding 2 hours when you’re going to struggle. And you don’t need to find large blocks of time together, necessarily. A lot of people write books in 30 minutes a day. Volume is secondary to consistency.
So, find times that work for you, both with your schedule, and your energy/brain. This does not have to be the same time every day. They also do not have to be EVERY day. The key here is to find places you can work without having to reconfigure your entire life. Maybe this means giving up an hour of television every day. Maybe it means doing it doing your lunch hour. But find some space for yourself here. And, especially when you first start out, set easily reachable goals, and add to them from there. Your brain will be motivated by incidents of success.
It probably does need to be about the same amount of time, week to week, whether that’s a cumulative hour, or even six hours. But the quantity of time is more important than it being at the same time every day. If your brain is in the habit of being creative for the same amount of time every week, then the skill will develop so that it is no longer a struggle.
And when you first start out, schedule the time, and show up for it, without putting a lot of productivity targets up for yourself. Show up, with the intent to work. If nothing comes out, sit there for a while (don’t scroll on your phone yes, I’m talking to myself here) before giving yourself permission to do something else. The muse sometimes needs to know where to meet you. If you expect this from yourself, your brain will eventually learn to cooperate to avoid being bored.
So, schedule the time that works for you. Then … and this is important … share this information with the people in your life. Tell them ‘This is my writing time please don’t interrupt me unless someone important is on fire.’ When I rededicated myself to writing back in 2019, I realized I needed to do this. And it took the people in my life a little while to get used to it, but now I share my schedule with them with my writing time clearly demarcated, and it’s just known that this is what I’m doing. And yes, of course, if there is some sort of genuine emergency, you should be interruptible. But there are very few genuine emergencies that crop up.
So, schedule the time, show up for the time and COMMUNICATE the time. Those are some of the biggest roadblocks to establishing a creative habit.
Once you have the time, develop little rituals for yourself that tell your brain it is time to work. For myself, I do a ten-minute meditation on creativity to get me going. I also start off every writing session by giving a light edit to what I wrote last session.
But it’s important that when you’re starting out, you’re making sure you’re establishing the habit, not necessarily concentrating on being super productive right away. You might be! Or you might be at first and then find a couple of weeks in that it’s more of a struggle. Building the habit is the important thing. You will build up to truly impressive amounts of productivity eventually. Just like when you start running, you can’t run a marathon, or maybe even a mile, but you start building the habit, get your body to know what you’re expecting of it, and then get stronger over time.
And it’s important that you start to think of yourself as a writer. A writer is someone who writes. Not necessarily someone who publishes, but they write regularly. Also, not someone who thinks about writing and has a trilogy planned they haven’t written one word of. By scheduling your work time, showing up for it, and then actually doing it, you prove to yourself and the world that you’re actually a writer. Make it an important part of your identity and don’t let anyone take it away from you.
Even if you just have ten minutes a day to devote to your writing. Or maybe just a couple of hours on a Saturday every week, consistency can propel you a very long way.
I wish I could give you an ideal schedule to follow, but no one else can figure that out for you. Everyone’s life is different, and it will be harder for some people than others, depending on their outside responsibilities. If you have to work two jobs and raise toddlers by yourself, this will be a bigger challenge than it would be for, say, me. But it can happen no matter what else you have going on, even if it’s just a couple of sentences a day.
So, yeah, if you want to do this for real, you will need to make it a regular part of your life. That will look different for you than it will for other people. Whatever way works is valid. You don’t have to mimic anyone else’s schedule or level of productivity. Whatever gets you writing is a major victory.