Mental Kitchen

Jane Austen wrote in her family room and was constantly interrupted by house guests. Agatha Christie never really had a writing spot, preferring to plop her typewriter down on any level surface and bang out an hour’s worth of prose.

You don’t need a dedicated desk or hours of time to create. You just need the will and the urge to get it done.

I actually find that too much time is not the blessing it could be. As a school teacher, I luck into copious vacation time each holiday and summer. Yet with all that expansive time, somehow the work doesn’t keep pace.

Instead, my most productive times are when I’ve got a schedule to keep. Getting into the classroom to teach. It’s the schedule that really helps a writer, not the time.

Sometimes I only have 15 minutes to write, yet I still relish that time. I dive into my prose like an Olympic swimmer simply because I know I can’t dawdle.

Am I producing a 1000 words a day? No. But I’m getting down in the trenches and doing the hard work of slogging forward — word by word, paragraph by paragraph.

Look at your schedule and think where you can carve out 15 or 30 minutes. Once you find this time, guard it jealously. Make sure you have what you need to work on hand (instruments for musicians, art supplies for artists, etc).

And when you reach your designated work time, get to it. The clock is ticking. Don’t worry if it’s good enough. You can critique it some other time. The important thing is to create something.

Tim Kane