Author Mari McCarthy on No Time to Write

No time to write? Put it in your journal!

A writer is for life. That’s why many who love writing find themselves now and then unable to devote time to it. There may be portions of your life when it’s no more possible to give serious attention to writing than it is to walk on water.

Oh, you work miracles enough. You lead your kids through another day of learning, loving, hurting, healing, threats and comforts. You support the team at work; you are there for your mother or your BFF. You survive the daily commute, you eat holistically, you vote. You do a million other things, but writing that novel is just a faraway dream.

The dream lives on in you, as if in a cocoon, in a deep inside pocket. It will be ready when you are.

In the meantime, I suggest that you journal. It will be a worthy substitute! My definition of journal: any regular entries in a dedicated notebook, preferably handwritten, created over time and containing whatever content pleases the writer.

Your range of possibilities is large when you journal instead of create a product like a book or script or poetry. You can

• do free association writing, keeping the pen moving no matter what, for set periods of time.
• journal scraps of images and ideas, bits of prose or poetry for potential use in your eventual creation;
• journal your angst about not being able to devote to writing;
• recount utterly unrelated events and/or thoughts;
• focus on your newborn daughter, or the deployment that commands your attention, or your demanding job.

That is to say, you can journal about anything: it will have the same effect. It will be writing practice for later, when you write professionally.

Think you don’t have the time even to journal? If you have five minutes, you have time. More to the point, it’s a question of how intensely you want to write. If you want to stay fit as a writer, your journal – however brief – is a free and easy way to practice your chops.

You may realize that a five-minute journaling session before you turn the light out at night is not a bad idea. Or that you could use the last moments of your lunch break to do something more healthy than eat a dessert. Or that writing for a few minutes first thing in the morning sets your day on a more even course. You have to try it out, let your journaling habit find its level in your life.

A writer writes. In a journal if nothing else.

Funny thing is, once free to write more professionally, many a writer will continue journaling anyway. Has that been true in your experience? Journaling, it seems, has its own rewards. It helps as a way to practice scales, but it’s really so much more. It’s a source and motivating force while continuing to be a humble routine workout. Funny how things come around like that.

Mari L. McCarthy is The Journaling Therapy Specialist, founder of Create Write Now and Journaling for the Health of It™.  Mari offers guidance, counseling and encouragement to writers through her many journaling eBooks and in private Journaling Jumpstart consultations.  Mari has published nine books to date. For more on ways that journaling brings self-knowledge, see Who Are You? How to Use Journaling Therapy to Know and Grow Your Life.Mari’s hosting the next Peace of Mind and Body: 27 Days of Journaling Challenge starting January 2, 2012. Please join her!

Mari is giving away her ebook! Just comment and leave your email address to be entered

The 51 page Dark Chocolate for the Journaler’s Soul ebook compiles the journaling journeys of 17 journalers who have shared their stories on Create Write Now’s Journal Writing Transforms You blog. Reading these stories is both comforting and enlightening, sort of like dark chocolate, a food that is good for your health despite being sinfully delicious!

In this eBook, travel with journaling experts as they reveal:
• What you should do when you find yourself cheating on your journal
• How you can make the Blank Page work for you
• What it’s like to reconnect with your Inner Kid
• How journal writing hastens healing
• What the best time of day to journal is
and many more journal writing tips and tricks, ideas and inspiration that will help you jumpstart your personal journal practice for the first time or the four hundredth time.