Writers don’t always have a lot of free time to write. The younger we are, the more of a tendency there is for us to be busy. We have kids, or are about to have kids, we have jobs or are at home with our kid’s full time, and we have husbands who work long hours so that even our evenings aren’t free.

    If you find yourself in this situation, you are not alone. You are in the midst of a busy season in your life. However, I always coach the writers who I work with to do more than live their lives and not spend time doing the things that they love.

    If you are a writer, and you enjoy writing, and you miss writing when you’re not writing, then you owe it to yourself to find them to write and to make it a priority, much like taking shower in the morning, getting some exercise every day, and brushing your teeth as well as eating.

    This is because writing makes our lives rich and vibrant. We feel ourselves and we feel more whole because through writing we make sense of our lives somehow. We also can become better writers as we write. So, if we stop writing for years at a time, we won’t be developing our craft as writers.

    Further, we won’t be getting any writing done at all unless we write on a fairly regular basis. But how can we write regularly when we are in a busy season of our lives?

Here are a few things you can try.

• Prioritize your writing so that you write most days, even if it is only for fifteen minutes to half an hour.

• Assert yourself with your family and friends so that you can make time for yourself and your writing. After all, you will be happier and more fulfilled and you will be able to enjoy spending time with them if they give you a bit of time for things that matter to you, such as your writing.

• Set small, concrete goals that are doable. This way, when you get to your writing you will know precisely what to work on.

• Treat writing as any other things important feature of your life. Don’t treat it as a hobby. But treat it with the utmost importance. That way, you won’t have any regrets later on.

• Remember that if you don’t write today, this is one day that you can never recapture again. It is gone and will never come back.

So, please be sure that you write regularly so that you don’t have regrets later on. You don’t want to wake up when you are forty or fifty years only to discover that you always wanted to write but didn’t because you had to take care of your family.

The good news is that you can have kids, raise a family, work, be a housewife and mother, and still write. You just have to make it a priority and believe its important. Then you can have a whole lot of writing done and even books published while you are raising your family and working.

Take some time to prioritize writing and the other parts of your life.

Good luck!

Irene S. Roth