Boy do women suffer this issue in spades. Our diffuse awareness, our natural penchant for the word yes, our desire to be of service and beautify our corner of the world — all good things. But really, busyness is a choice. Doormat is a choice. Post office is a choice. And writing a novel is a choice.

I always find that if the WHY isn't compelling enough, no amount of goal setting and "intending" is going to amount to squat. We all have circumstances and things and people and stuff that we allow to stall our commitments, but can we tolerate the thought that "dishes" might be the things that will define us in the end?

At then end of our days do we want to say, wow, I got those dishes done…but oops, I never wrote that novel? Can we tolerate setting aside the BIG FAT SOUL SERVING SATISFACTION our writing and storytelling and self expression gives us (and the world)? Can we tolerate the thought of never being who we really are?

You know the person who was 300 pounds and ends up running a marathon at age 50 because she finally made the connection between her self worth, her health and her limited time on the planet?

We have to chunk up to the bigger space our writing lives in to make actual space for it in real life.

My 2 cents and I'm stickin' to it 🙂

Give yourself five minutes in the morning maybe. Or maybe get up ten minutes earlier and write. I bet you could find five or ten minutes, no?

If you do 1K/day, you have to deal with it. You push through. It won't be perfect, but now you've got something to shape in the revisions.

And, once you get into the rhythm, after a couple of weeks, it's easy to sit down and drop into the world of your book. So, instead of saying, "I only have ten minutes to write, it's not even worth starting", you can drop in and write for ten minutes and come up with nearly a page or so.

If you're on a roll — go and write 4000 words in a day. I often do.

When you're on a publishing schedule, you don't get to have more than a day or two per book to only write 10 words, no matter what you feel like or what the time frame is. It's like any freelancing gig. You sit and get the job done.

If you don't train yourself to do it before your first novel, you blow it when you start going on contract, and your publisher drops you.

Books aren't written doing 10 words one day and 4K the next. They're written through building a steady, daily rhythm, and not walking away from the page when it's tough.