Just Get On With It- Set Aside the Time to Write

It seems simple, right?

If you have a goal, then you can only accomplish your goal by setting time aside to tackle it. But what happens when all that other life stuff gets in the way? I don't even mean going to events and spending time with your friends and family. I mean the other stuff. The things you can't avoid.

I'm going to preface this with a statement: I love my day job. Getting the chance to be creative, change lives and have fun at the same time isn't the experience many folks get at work. But teaching is a tough gig. Right now, everyone is probably sick of seeing teachers in the news in the UK. Strike! We want more money. We want less work. We want to be treated better. And so on, and so on. Even I am fed up hearing about it. But I am even more fed up with living it.

So me writing about how hard it is to balance my life as a teacher with my passion for writing should not be much of a shock. Because the news stories are true- we are having a hard time in the teaching profession right now. And having a hard time at my day job means an even tougher time in my writing job. Lots of writers have full or part time day jobs to help fund their writing passion, so I know I am not alone in this. I do, however, wonder how many other writers are insane enough to try to balance writing with a day job like teaching. I cannot express to you how draining teaching is. There are long hours of teaching, planning and marking, but that isn't always what drains you the most. Sometimes, the hardest part is having to spend hours exuding enough energy to not only get yourself through the day, but to get thirty two other people going, too. A different set of thirty two people every hour. I get up at 5am and am a whirling cyclone of energy from then, until I get home.

No wonder the prospect of then picking up my laptop and hashing out some writing seems insurmountable. Sagging like a deflated balloon on the sofa, I sometimes find it difficult to even get myself a drink or move upstairs to go to bed, let alone push through to get something productive done.

After a decade of living this daily cycle of hours of hyper energy followed by a massive crash, I knew that if I wanted to finally take my writing seriously, I would have to cut back. It was scary, but I dropped to four days a week at school. For a while, I felt invigorated and took every chance I got to write again. I'm a year in to this now and I am feeling the drag sneak up on me again. I won't go into details of the particular difficulties hitting my school/ department right now, but suffice to say it is enough to make me feel as if I am working full time again, even during what should be the easiest half term of the year. Five weeks before summer and I just picked up five new classes. That's over 120 new faces. 120 new kids to drag across the finish line, when I can barely drag myself.

Setting time aside to write has always been a difficult with my workload, but recently, setting aside the energy necessary has been the hardest thing.

My point at the end of this ramble is that sometimes people don't understand that writers don't just need to get on with it and set aside the time to write. I see this argument in so many articles and blog posts- writers will succeed if they just set aside enough time to commit. But it is an emotional and creative process, which only comes with rest, energy and enthusiasm. At the end of the day, for those of us with day jobs, this isn't as simple as setting aside time. It means setting aside energy and passion for jobs that we love equally as much, and saving it for our writing.

I don't know about anybody else, but I'm not built that way. I give everything my all, even if it costs me. I'm sure many writers are the same.

So if you are one of those writers sat there, knowing you want to just get on with it and commit to your passion, but seem unable to drum up the energy on a daily basis- I am with you. You can still be passionate about writing, be successful in the writing field, and also understand that occasionally you might have to say: not today.