The perfect writing schedule does not exist.
Oh, I’ve dreamt of it. I’ve thought: If I could just find this mythological creature, the perfect writing schedule would unlock my career! It would bring me untold success!
It doesn’t work that way. At least… not for me.
See, the idea of a perfect writing schedule is one that I think many writers dream about. If you’re self-published, it may mean you can consistently and quickly produce books—a powerful strategy that can’t be undervalued in today’s market. If you’re a writer pursuing other goals, the perfect writing schedule has other benefits. Practice makes perfect, after all. And rare is the writer who can somehow obtain an agent without a finished novel in hand.
Lofty goals like NaNoWriMo—writing 1,667 words per day and having a finished novel at the end—that can feel like the perfect writing schedule. A set number of words per day as you work your way through the books you’d like to write.
But sometimes life has other plans. Sometimes, you plan to get up early to write and you sleep through your alarm. Sometimes, you think you’ll have free time to work on your book after your Day Job, but a family member or friend needs your help. Or sometimes, you find yourself just staring blankly at the screen, unsure what to write next. Unsure if you can.
(Spoiler: you can)
And you know what? That’s okay. All of those things have happened to me too.
It’s okay to sometimes find yourself in a creative rut, or that life sometimes interferes with your perfect writing schedule. The important thing is to keep coming back to the page and trying, even when you break your streak. Give yourself credit for trying. It’s more than a lot of people who say they’d “like to write a book someday” will do.
Why yes, I did write this post so that I can come back to it on hard writing days.
So the perfect writing schedule doesn’t exist. But that doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying to create it.
And if it did, my ideal perfect writing schedule Monday-Thursday these days is:
5:30 AM: Wake up
5:40 AM: Putz around the kitchen, eat breakfast, generally try to become coherent
5:50 AM: Open up my latest project and read the last page or so where I left off.
6:00-9:00 AM: Write at least 1,000 words. Sometimes it takes the entire 3 hours. Sometimes it takes less than one.
9:00 AM-2:00 PM: Get ready and go to my part-time day job. Occasionally have time to log into Evernote or another cloud-based web app (like, say 4theWords) and sneak in around 200 more words.
And… usually, that’s it. My creative well tends to run dry by afternoon, so I try to save more administrative author work for the afternoon. But if I manage some words at this point, they’re all just gravy.
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