I love getting the opportunity to talk about books and writing, and during an interview on Australian radio I was asked – when do you find time to write?
Admittedly my plate is pretty full and writing crime mystery fiction novels in amongst my real job, busy family life and community commitments can be a challenge, but I discipline myself to write for 10 minutes every single day. It doesn’t matter what time of day I snatch this 10 minutes, but I figure that the words I write in 10 minutes all add up to make a finished novel one day!
I have shared this tip so many times, and most recently at a business breakfast when a woman approached me to ask if I could help with her writer’s block. She allocated three hours at a set time every day as her writing time, but every time she sat down to write, the words just wouldn’t come. I told her about my 10 minutes a day, and at the breakfast the following month she greeted me with…
“You have changed my world! Thank you! I can’t thank you enough!”
It was a wonderful feeling to make such an impact on someone else’s writing with such a simple concept. By choosing to write for just 10 minutes, she had removed the pressure she was putting on herself to write for three hours. And the great thing was, she would end up writing for the three hours anyway.
I am now in the finishing stages of my fourth crime mystery novel, You’ll Never Find Me, and it is my biggest novel yet at 100,000 words. But it has taken the least amount of time to write thanks to my very successful strategy of just writing for 10 minutes a day.