Welcome to Speak Up!, a blog and newsletter about
creative writing and everyday life

In these posts I focus on the messy realities and difficulties, and also the joys, of building and maintaining a creative writing practice amid conflicting demands and responsibilities, including caregiving. How can we find the time, energy and motivation to speak up and be heard? How can we persevere and ‘fail better’?

Featuring original pieces about creative writing practice and process, interviews with writers, prompts to spark off new work, and recommendations for competitions, books and magazines, courses and other opportunities, this newsletter aims to motivate, inspire, and support your writing life. If you’d like these posts delivered to your inbox, please subscribe to the mailing list.

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Time to Write

When I was a creative writing student in my 20s someone asked a visiting writer at the university, a novelist from a working-class background, how he'd found the time to write when he was starting out. 'Free time to write is a middle-class luxury,' he replied, before explaining that he'd written at the table each morning while his wife was making breakfast for the family. Which made me wonder about his wife: what did she do if she wanted to write or paint, or do some other artistic activity without an obvious practical use? I began to think hard about necessity and luxury, and how we classify, access, use and value our time.

Now that I’m a solo parent, child-free activities – a leisurely bath, a film, going to a pub or café in the evening with friends – and any other time spent away from paid work or family, are a rare luxury. Writing snags its roots into the gaps: in the glow of my phone’s notes app in toddler sleep time, in lulls between freelance work. Without accountability or deadlines, though, very little gets done. There is always something more practical and pressing. Laundry, mucky cat litter, missing buttons that need sewing back on, grocery orders, cleaning up mud and crumbs, and also the important business of nurturing friendships with phonecalls, zooms and whatsapp messages, now that so many of my friends live in different parts of the country. But poetry is, I keep reminding myself, not a luxury, and nor should the time to write it be. If I’m honest, my writing has always budded in gaps and in-between spaces. I’ve written poem drafts in my head on bus journeys and while teaching classes, and ideas have surfaced while I’ve been out for a run, or mid-conversation. Like childcare, the work of writing resists being boxed in or made distinct from the rest of our lived experience. But it is, nevertheless, work, especially in any extended form. My poetry collections probably wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for funded writing time via Arts Council England grants.

laptop at the living room table — Laptop at the living room table

For many of us, time to write is carved out of compromises, sacrifices, and other people's labour and kindness. And even when we're lucky enough to have some dedicated writing time, we often find it's eaten away by housework, the demands of others, or good old procrastination. Letting your own words speak on the page often seems like the least important thing on a long list of priorities. How can we find, or make, time to write - especially if we have demanding day jobs, or caring responsibilities, or both?

Like childcare, the work of writing resists being boxed in or made distinct from the rest of our lived experience.

Make writing a priority

Easier said than done! But if you can change your thinking around how much your writing matters, this will help to shift other, less pressing items down the priorities list.

Does it matter if the laundry stays damp in the basket for a day or two, or if you don’t answer your emails or messages straight away? Do you need to post daily on 3 social media platforms? You might need to let your standards slide – both in life and in writing – to get things done. If you can dedicate some time to your writing regularly, avoid the temptation to fill it up with other things, and don’t let yourself be persuaded out of it. If you have a full-on job, consider changing your work or working patterns. You might consider going part-time, if you can afford it, or trying to find work that doesn’t expand beyond the basic 9 to 5, and/or that nurtures the parts of you that enjoy writing. There’s a nice piece here about how different writers fit creative writing in with and around their day jobs.

Be realistic about how much time you have

A weekly planner can be helpful. An honest assessment of how you spend your time can be illuminating. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t allow time for staring into space, looking for your missing socks or keys, chatting with friends, or catching up on sleep. Time to write is often not as linear as you think (see ‘Make Space’).

Start small

Unless you’re very lucky and very determined, deciding to get up each day at 5am and write for 2 hours is probably setting yourself up for failure. Writing is a muscle; start small and build it up slowly. You might begin with some automatic writing or ‘morning pages’. Keep a notebook or notes app and note down phrases, ideas and images that strike you. It can be useful to keep a list of ideas and starting points you’d like to work on.

Use deadlines and accountability

Set your own goals and deadlines or use a class, accountability partner or mentor to help you. If you’re ready to submit work, make a list of competitions or publisher deadlines that interest you. For poets, there are some excellent resources online at the Poetry Library. Let your friends know about your projects and deadlines. A supportive friend asking, from time to time, how your writing’s going, can be priceless.

Recognise the value of gaps, cracks, sparks, and spare moments

If you have the energy and brain space, use small chunks of time to write. This doesn’t always mean physically writing something down: you might puzzle out the ending of a short story or the central image of a poem while waiting for the bus, stuck in a traffic jam, or walking to the shops. Inspiration can happen anywhere, so be ready. I’ve had little time to read novels recently but I’ve read scores of children’s books out loud, and this is brilliant food for my writing too.

Be Kind to yourself

A lot of people seem to secretly enjoy feeling guilty about not writing. In the past, I’ve definitely been one of them. Wasting time looking at T-shirts on the internet is suddenly weirdly attractive, and, of course, addictive, when you feel you have an impossible task ahead of you. But beating yourself up is counterproductive. It’s far better to be kind to yourself, recognise when you need a break – which may include some mindless scrolling – and be motivated by doing what energises you. Write because you want to, not because you feel you should.

Cultivate growing space

Finding time to write is also about cultivating energy, possibility, and space for ideas and words to take root and grow. It can be harder to find space and time to write if you’re preoccupied with, for example, toxic workplace politics, family problems, finances, or illness. Which isn’t to say that writing can’t also be a way of thinking things through and persevering in difficult times. But a sense of scarcity, fear and pervasive worry can definitely get in the way. I think making space to write is often about aiming towards security, care, and richness, so that you feel able to speak up and to take risks. This will mean different things for different people. For me, it’s 15 minutes of internet yoga at the beginning of workdays, daffodils on the table, listening to audio versions of poetry collections in spare moments, the folk session at our local brewery on a Friday afternoon. And family time. Time spent not actually, physically writing can be fundamental in helping your work to grow.