Have the Stones to do it!

(Making time to write when you think your life is too busy!)

If you are going to write, if you are going to call yourself a writer, then write, finish something and put it out there. At a leadership conference I attended recently, part of the training was focused upon scheduling your time. Believe it or not, it wasn’t all about the proper way of saying something or modeling something; a huge chunk of time was spent teaching us how imperative it is to schedule the important stuff.

The gist was – in your life there are the big rocks, the stones, the things you want and must do to achieve success in whatever you do. The time for these things, like writing, is competing with everything else in your life… and let’s face it, if you want to be successful a writer, you need to write. You need to write, and often, until you are so good at it, that someone says, “Man, we gotta publish that!” The other stuff, like watching less than averagely good looking guys wrestle alligators on television, randomly surfing the internet or creeping facebook… is the stuff that will not help your writing career – that stuff is the pebbles, the sand, the dirt. If you fill your jar with pebbles and dirt first – then there is no room for the stones.

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A Writer’s Gotta Write

 ... anywhere and everywhere
… anywhere and everywhere

They’re everywhere. You’ve seen them. You know who I mean.

They’ll be in a restaurant, furtively casting about for the sordid enablers of their habits: a pencil, a pen, a crayon from the kids’ activity box. Then begins the begging for something – the back of a receipt, a crumpled serviette – as long as it’s portable and papery, to write on.

Soon, not caring if there’s a conversation, a meal, a concert – completely and rudely oblivious – they will hunch over, head down, lips moving silently. They can’t help themselves; they’re addicted. Read more