Writing: Finding Your Own Right Time to Write

I have met and spoken with people who do their writing - at least the lion's share of it - during a specific window of time each day. Some prefer early in the morning, before their minds are crowded with the other thoughts and issues that pile up inside a person's brain as the day moves along while others prefer night time composition, as an exercise in 'mind cleansing' before going to sleep. Still others seem to prefer mid-day writing, an option most commonly available to professional writers or those who do not have day jobs competing for their time and creative energies. Clearly, when it comes to finding the right time to write, one size does not fit all.

As a part-time writer who does have a full-time day job and a myriad of other hobbies, activities and interests I am involves with, I have found that writing whenever an idea strikes me - even if that happens in the middle of the night - is generally the closest I have been able to come to finding the right time for myself. It's not that I have not tried other ways of structuring the activity for myself.

For a while, I tried jotting down ideas on a pad of paper, then setting aside a block of time every day or two to sit sown and write them up. The problems became, of course, that by the time I sat down to write, much of the original idea had evaporated into that vast ionosphere of inevitable distortion and forgetfulness. Even when I could remember the core of the idea, the details that struck me when the topic first occurred to me were lost rendering the entire idea less interesting, at least to me.

I began to carry a mini-tape recorder to capture more of the original ideas whenever they struck - but still, the original thought and impulse had lost its power by the time I sat down to listen to my own thoughts and rethink them as I jotted down my notes, read them and then recomposed the thought(s) on paper (or, more commonly, on MS Word.)

Disciplined schedules or impulsive, intuitive here-and-now events: each of us must find our own right time to write.

Credit: Public domain

Copyright: Public domain