There’s this scene in Love Actually that I really hate. Colin Firth plays a famous author working on a new book at his Italian villa overlooking a scenic lake. It always makes me cringe. Not the part where the wind blows his precious manuscript into the lake or the part where he dives into the freezing water to save it. What bugs me is the idea that somewhere in the world there are writers with lakeside villas. I usually have this thought while I’m trying to prop my phone on the steering wheel during a lunch break. There would surely be more legroom in an Italian villa.
I’m not a full-time writer. I spend the majority of my working hours teaching elementary special education outside of Philadelphia. I happen to like it very much, despite the obvious challenges of sneaking writing into the cracks of a rather busy professional life. I write before my family gets up in the morning. I write on my lunch breaks and while I’m waiting for meetings to start. I know I’m not the only one doing it this way, so I thought I’d share a few of the things that have helped me so far on my journey.
I SNEAK PRE-WRITING INTO RANDOM BREAKS
For me, the most time-consuming part of writing is the part where I scan back over what I wrote the day before. If I only have 25 minutes to write, this pre-writing process could easily take all of that time. Recently I’ve been trying to sneak pre-writing into shorter breaks when drafting isn’t practical. Maybe I have a 10-minute window early in the day - that’s a good time to re-read the previous days’ work or scan through my character notes. If I can knock those things out before my longer break, I’m able to devote more of that time to actually writing.
I GOT A KEYBOARD FOR MY PHONE
It sounds like an unnecessary luxury, but every time I prop up my phone to write something, I’m glad I’m not thumbing out a manuscript on that tiny little screen. With a bluetooth keyboard that connects to your phone, you can write in a park, in the car, while you’re waiting for your kid to finish swim lessons. A keyboard is more portable and a lot cheaper than a laptop, and if you’re like me and keep your writing on a cloud server like Google Docs, you can pick up wherever you left off once you’re back at the computer.
I KEEP A DAILY WORD COUNT
Sometimes my daily word count is pretty abysmal, but if I’m drafting something, I’ve learned that the numbers always add up. I’ll often get to the end of what I thought was a really terrible writing week and find that I actually wrote 2,000 words. For me in the middle grade world, four months of “terrible” writing weeks can add up to a whole book! To be sure, there are some weeks when my word count really is super low or nonexistent, but keeping track helps me to reflect on why it happened, rather than just beating myself up for not being committed.
And that brings me around to my last thought - above all else, I have to go easy on myself. Sometimes the day job is going to eclipse my writing goals. That has to be okay.
Oh, and I never keep the only copy of my manuscript stacked under a mug near a windy lake. Obviously.
