Children

Jobs

Lovers

Friends

Jury Duty

Q: What do all of the above have in common?

A: They are legitimate challengers for your time, the real people and the real reasons it is sometimes hard to find time to write.

But here’s the thing, and there’s really no escaping it: Unless you are an emergency room M.D., a soldier in active battle, or the single parent of more than six children, you have time to write. You may not have time to write and watch the same amount of football you’ve always watched, or time to write and go out with friends every night, but you definitely have time to write.

Spend more than a few minutes examining your day-to-day life and you’ll see that I’m right. The problem isn’t that you don’t have time to write; the problem is getting yourself to set aside a time that is reserved for one thing and one thing only – writing – and then doing it.

So here is today’s lesson, and you should probably start scratching these lessons into your walls in giant letters:

CREATE A SACRED WRITING TIME, THEN WRITE DURING THAT TIME EVERY SINGLE DAY.

No buts, what ifs, or I have to do something elses. Create a sacred time, a time that no one has a right to question you about, a time that you let nothing or no one steal from you. Then write today during your sacred time. Then write tomorrow during your sacred time. Repeat, repeat, and then repeat some more.

After you’ve written 300 pages, or 300 poems, feel free to take a day off. For now, for the simple reason that you have never written a book, or compiled a volume of poems, you have no reason to believe you can or ever will.  But have no fear; that is the beauty of creating sacred time. Respect that time every single day and you cannot help but add pages together, one at a time, until, one day soon, you will look up and say – I did it!

I have already done that, written THE END, not once, not twice, but five times and counting (and that includes only books I did not throw away after finishing). When you have done it just once we’ll talk about writing when you feel like it, or when the muse visits, or at different times on different days. For now, better to think of yourself as an apprentice who has something very important to prove, exactly one important thing: I can do it!

So do. Write today during your sacred time. Then write tomorrow during your sacred time. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When you reach page 300, or finish your 300th poem, email me at philipdealbooks@gmail.com and I’ll give you a shout out right here. You have my sacred promise.