Making Space to Write — Even When Life Is Already Full

One of the great myths about writing is that you need the perfect room before you can begin.

You know the sort of room I mean: a beautiful desk beside a window, shelves full of reference books, tasteful lighting, perhaps an inspirational view across rolling hills, and absolutely nobody wandering through asking where the scissors have gone.

Most of us do not have that room. We have a corner. And a corner is enough.

Create Somewhere That Belongs to Your Writing

A writing space does not have to be large, expensive or remotely impressive. It simply needs to become somewhere your brain begins to associate with writing.

It might be a desk in the spare room, one end of the dining table, a chair beside a bookshelf or a small corner where your laptop can remain undisturbed for a few hours.

My own writing space is surrounded by books. Some are books I have already written, sitting there as a quiet reminder that ideas really can become finished stories if you keep working at them, while others are books that have inspired me over the years, taught me something about storytelling or simply made me fall in love with reading all over again. I like having them around me because they are part encouragement, part reference library and part evidence that every book begins as nothing more impressive than someone deciding to put the first words down.

I also like having the smaller things connected to writing nearby: notebooks, pens, reference material and bits of paper covered in notes that made perfect sense when I wrote them and occasionally make rather less sense when I find them three weeks later.

There is something comforting about familiar objects. They turn an ordinary space into somewhere creative work happens, and sometimes simply sitting down among those books and notes is enough to tell my brain that it is time to stop thinking about everything else and return to the story.

I write mainly on a computer, but that does not mean everything begins there. Ideas have a habit of arriving when I am nowhere near a keyboard, so paper still has an important place in my writing life.

Sometimes a handwritten note captures an idea differently from typing it. There is less temptation to correct every sentence while it is still trying to become a thought.

The important thing is not whether you use a computer, notebook, journal, scraps of paper or the back of an envelope that was supposed to contain the power bill.

The important thing is that you use something.

Give Writing a Place in Your Day

People often decide they are going to start writing and immediately design a routine that would exhaust a professional novelist.

• Three hours every morning. 
• Two thousand words before breakfast.
• A chapter every day.
• This usually lasts until approximately Wednesday.
• Writing regularly matters, but the habit is more important than the heroic schedule.
• If you are beginning, twenty minutes can be enough.

Twenty minutes before the house wakes up, twenty minutes after dinner or twenty minutes while someone else watches television can gradually become a surprisingly productive writing life. A small amount of time used regularly will take you further than an ambitious timetable that makes you feel guilty every time you fail to keep it.

As writing becomes part of your routine, you may naturally want to increase the time you spend doing it. That is much easier than demanding several hours from yourself on the first day and discovering that creativity refuses to behave like a factory shift.

Writing needs discipline, certainly, but it also needs a routine you can actually live with.

Start Somewhere Smaller Than a Book

Many people who want to write immediately think, I should write a book. You certainly can. But a book is a large creature. It requires characters, structure, continuity, persistence and a surprising willingness to spend months arguing with imaginary people.

There is nothing wrong with starting smaller. Write a short story, a personal reflection, something that happened when you were younger, a description of a place you remember or an ordinary event turned into a story.

These shorter pieces teach you how you like to write and what subjects keep pulling you back. They also give you something wonderfully useful: finished work. There is a great deal of confidence to be gained from reaching the end of something, even if that something is only a thousand words long.

Start a Blog

A blog is one of the easiest ways to begin putting your writing into the world.

It does not need to become a business, gather thousands of readers or suddenly require you to understand mysterious things such as algorithms at three o’clock in the morning. It can simply be somewhere you write.

Your subject can be almost anything: books, gardening, family stories, travel, cooking, grandchildren, history, science fiction or the peculiar behaviour of neighbours' cats.

The beauty of blogging is that you can discover your subject while you are doing it.

Some writers begin with one topic and gradually realise that something else is much more interesting to them. That is perfectly acceptable. A blog is allowed to grow alongside its writer.

You can publish once a week, once a fortnight or whenever you have something worth saying.

Consistency helps, but nobody should have to invent a crisis merely because Tuesday happens to be blog day.

For me, blogging has become part of the wider writing journey. It gives me somewhere to explore ideas that do not belong inside a novel and somewhere to talk about writing, science fiction, books and the odd thought that has refused to leave me alone.

Write About Your Own Life

Not every writer wants to create fictional worlds. Sometimes the stories worth preserving are already sitting around the family table. A family newsletter, collection of memories or simple account of everyday life can become far more valuable than we realise while we are writing it. Families carry enormous amounts of history that are never written down.

We assume we will remember. We assume somebody else knows the story. Then years pass, people are gone, and suddenly nobody can remember why Granddad refused to eat apricots or exactly what happened during that infamous Christmas when everyone stopped speaking to Uncle George.

Write these things down. They do not have to become polished memoirs. Record the little stories, names, places, traditions, arguments that eventually became funny, recipes nobody measures properly and the strange family sayings that make absolutely no sense outside your own household.

These ordinary details are often the pieces future generations treasure most.

Keep a Journal

A journal gives you permission to write without an audience. That is enormously useful. There is no need to make every sentence beautiful or wonder whether anybody else will understand what you mean. You can simply observe.

What happened today? What did you notice? What annoyed you? What made you laugh? What did somebody say in a café that immediately made you wonder what their story was?

Writers learn by paying attention.

A journal encourages that habit because you begin noticing conversations, gestures, weather, buildings, expressions and the tiny moments most people walk past without thinking about them. Those observations have a habit of appearing later in fiction.

A character suddenly uses a gesture you saw months ago, a café becomes the beginning of a scene, or a sentence somebody spoke in passing develops into an entire story.

Very little is wasted once a writer begins observing properly.

Eventually, Write the Book

If a book is what you truly want to write, then write it. There is no requirement that you earn permission first. You do not need a degree, you do not need somebody to appoint you a writer and you do not have to wait until you know everything, because I can save you some time here: you never will.

Writing a book teaches you how to write that book. The first draft may be messy. Actually, it almost certainly will be.

Characters will change their minds halfway through, chapters will end up in the wrong places, a minor character may unexpectedly become important, while somebody you carefully planned for months may sit stubbornly in a corner refusing to contribute anything useful.

That is writing. The trick is continuing.

My own journey into writing has involved learning as I go, changing things when they do not work and discovering that a manuscript labelled FINAL has an astonishing ability to produce another version.

There is always something more to learn. That is part of what keeps writing interesting.

You Do Not Need Permission to Begin

This may be the most important part.

You do not need to wait for the perfect desk, the perfect notebook, the perfect idea or the perfect moment in your life. Those things are remarkably unreliable.

Begin with what you have: a chair, a notebook, a laptop, twenty minutes, one idea, one memory or one sentence.

You may decide that writing remains a private pleasure. You may start a blog, preserve your family history, write short stories for yourself or eventually discover that there is an entire novel waiting behind the first page.

There is no correct destination. The value is in making space for your own words and discovering what happens when you give them somewhere to go.

Writing does not require a grand beginning. Sometimes it begins quietly, in an ordinary corner of an ordinary room, surrounded by books that remind you where stories can take you, with a cup of tea slowly going cold beside the keyboard.

And then, before you quite realise what has happened, you have started.

— Rebecca Vardy