In the millennia of human history, no book has ever written itself. Certainly if you’re going to become an author, you’re going to have to write your book. Perhaps your mother or your spouse could write it for you, but then one of them would be an author and it would really be their book. One tiny problem: when is there ever time to write?

In some views there is an endless amount of time. After all, you have your entire life ahead of you. In other perspectives there is no time.

Among staying alive, paying the bills, and attending to loved ones, you’re probably not twiddling idle fingers. You may even be short changing sleep or something else or someone else. So called modern life with all its “labor saving” features seems immensely more complicated than life was just twenty years ago.

Cheap, easy communication has meant we tend to communicate more. More entertainment options seduce us into consuming more entertainment. None of this is a knock on contemporary life. As we have more choices, we tend to make more selections.

So if you could move to a deserted, tropical island, with only a laptop undoubtedly you’d have time to write. There would also be time to catch a few rays, savor fresh seafood, drift asleep to surf’s soothing rhythms. But it’s time to wake up: The bay’s howling, the spouse is grumpy, the kids boisterous, the mortgage due, and your mother’s sink overflowing.

If you’re beginning to think that there is no time to write, you’re right. There isn’t and there will never be. Not if you live in our world with the obligations that all of us have. If you want to write, if you must write, you must create the time to write.

Somehow, somewhere inside the endless chaos of your existence, you have to invent the time to write.

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