Probably the second most common question established writers get is “How do you find time to write?” If the writer is known to be a full-time writer, it’s usually phrased as “When you had a day job, how did you…” but it’s still the same question. These
Read more →I’m out of questions for the time being, so we’re back to my random musings on writing in general. Back when I was a beginning writer, I had a horror of “wasting writing time” by writing stuff that wasn’t actual pay copy. If it wasn’t intended to
Read more →When Dorothy asked about reposting my Hat Lecture, I realized that I hadn’t done an updated version since 2011. So here is a revised version (or you can just go read the original one, if you’d rather). The original Hat Lecture focused on the fact that a
Read more →One of my writer-friends, back when she had several toddlers and a day job to fit writing around, used to say that no one else will defend your time for you. You have to do it yourself. Which means you have to make writing one of your
Read more →One of the persistent questions writers get is “Where do you find the time?” This ignores two basic things: first, nobody finds or saves time, really. We all have 24 hours a day, which arrives one nanosecond at a time at the same pace (though how we
Read more →There’s a joke I heard once, about a man who prayed fervently for forty years that God would let him win the lottery. Finally one night as he was offering his prayer once again, a voice came out of the air above him and said, “Look, I
Read more →Possibly the most common complaint writers have – and I mean any writers, personal, amateur, professional, bestselling, famous, obscure – is that they don’t have enough time to write. At a presentation a few years back, that was the first thing someone asked: “How do you make
Read more →Everybody gets 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. That’s 168 hours, total. Nobody gets any more; nobody gets any less. Yet somehow one of the first things that gets asked when I talk to a bunch of would-be writers is “How do you make time
Read more →Back when you were working a FULL TIME JOB (in finance?) what was your schedule like? Did you have to burn a lot of midnight oil, and come to work exhausted the next day? How did it feel and what tips might you have for those of
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