Stolen from Tumblr. I’m going to bold the ones that I can definitely plead as ‘guilty’.
1. You are letting people tell you that you should be doing other things with your time.
2. You can’t live with the level of clean that your family accepts as normal.
3. You haven’t decided to treat your writing seriously and so no one around you treats it seriously, either.
4. You haven’t made yourself a writing space.
5. You haven’t realized that you need help.
6. You do what is urgent rather than what is necessary.
7. You don’t let your kids and other people solve their own problems.
8. You think that someday you will have more time for writing.
9. You are spending time doing things you actually don’t care about.
10. You are actually using distractions as an excuse not to write.
11. You are terrified of writing, of actually sitting down and putting yourself on the page.
12. You are too busy criticizing the best selling books that you are reading to write something better.
13. You don’t know what to do with a blank page.
14. You don’t know how to turn off your internal editor.
15. You talk a good game, but you don’t play it.
16. You need to do a little planning and research before you start.
17. You don’t actually like writing. You like having written. (Join the club.)
18. You need to write the first line of the next chapter before leaving for the day.
19. You need to spend time remembering what it is you love about writing.
20. You have convinced yourself that you need 2 hours to write and don’t know how to use the 20 minute chunks you actually have.
21. You don’t have notebooks scattered through the house, including in the bathroom, to jot down inspiration.
Now, I’m guilty of #21, but I don’t really jot down much. Maybe I should!
The one that took me the longest time to defeat was number 20. I don’t think in terms of time per day, just in terms of words. But it was important for me to realize that carving out two uninterrupted hours or writing a day just isn’t going to happen, until I manage to get to the point where I can write full time. Will I ever get there? I hope so. For now, I’m just going to write my arse off. And if twenty minutes is all I have, then hey — that’s 300 words or so, if I’m on my game. If not, it’s 200 or so.
Write when you can…and be liberal in your definition of “when you can”!
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You have a day job. You decided to forgo a day career for writing. I think those who can't find the time to write at all, confuse day career with day job and could never make the sacrifice in income and prestige that a day job requires.
You are a true writer
This will show up in my blog, eventually.