Finding Time to Write

One of the things I've noticed over the last couple of days is that finding the time to commit to writing can be difficult.

I don't have any excuses any more. I'm finished with my exams, I don't have any more projects to work on for school, hell, Uni is officially out for the summer. I mean, I have work, but it doesn't feel as time/life consuming as school did.

So why is it that finding time to write still feels so difficult?

I absolutely love writing. I mean, I must, right? I've been writing for years. I'm pretty sure my mom still has notebooks from when I was five filled with my Robert Munch rip offs. I have entire  binders filled with fan fiction and short stories from high school. I have two fully written first-draft manuscripts, one second draft manuscript and I'm about a quarter of the way through writing my third draft manuscript. I have dedicated years to writing purely because I love the act of putting words on paper. Or on a screen in the case of my manuscripts.

I think the problem is that I'm not writing something new right now. I'm revising the same project that I have been working on (on and off) for almost two years. I still love the story, but I've always hated reading my own writing and finding the problems with it. Plus it takes so much more time to sit and find the exact right words to use while revising.

I've had ten page papers due for school that I have literally written in an hour, but I've had a chapter in this manuscript that was ten pages long and took me over five hours to revise. This stage of writing takes up so much time and becomes such a commitment that it becomes harder and harder for force myself to sit down and do it, even though I want to. I will look at my binder filled with the draft of my manuscript that has all of my notes for what to fix and I'll think "yes, okay. I can totally do this. Let's get into it and finish revising this chapter today!" But then I start, and it takes me over an hour to move past a single page, and its frustrating.

Both of the first drafts for my two manuscripts were written during NaNoWriMo, so I had to write them ridiculously quickly. Usually I would end up writing entire chapters in about an hour, so having that time quintupled is slightly infuriating. I thought making the time to write enough words down during NaNo was difficult, let alone being able to set aside entire days to work on a single chapter of my novel.

Long story short, yes, finding time to write is difficult, but if you want to be successful as a writer then it is something that you have to do. It may be frustrating to have to spend as much time on a section as you need to, but it will make your novel that much better in the long run. You have to prioritize your writing, which is something that I am still learning to do, but is definitely a skill that I am working towards perfecting.