Making Time to Write Monday: If You Only Have 15 Minutes

I am a teacher by day. It just hit me this week that I think teaching has forced me to master efficiency. On any given day, I typically have between 0 minutes-60 minutes of planning time. The average is 30-50 minutes. However, there are many days that I’m lucky if I have a solid 15 minutes of time to really get things done. Having to do this day in and day out and still accomplish something has made me race against the clock. I often find myself thinking to myself: I have 12 minutes until I have to pick up the kids, what can I do? I always have little piles of things separated into tasks.

Because of that mindset, I find that I do the same thing with my writing and writing-related tasks. I try to spend some time (usually on the weekend) reorganizing the paper clutter on my desk. I separate my personal life (mail, bills, kids’ stuff) from my writing life, and I separate my writing tasks into piles.

Here are some of the writing tasks that I can do in 15 minutes. I realize yours might not look like mine. However, think about what you current work-in-progress looks like. What are some of the things that you need to do that are writing-related?

* Research something for my WIP. Setting the clock for 15 minutes helps to keep me from wasting a lot of time on the Internet. But there are times (many times) when you do need to do research for your book or fact check. I make a list of these fact-checking things and do them all at once or a few at a time.

* Brainstorm ideas for your next project. For the last two years, I’ve participated in PiBoIdMo, the picture book writer’s solution to NaNoWriMo. Every day in November I work on brainstorming an idea for a picture book. I never spend more than 15 minutes on this. This is NOT writing the draft, just brainstorming the idea.

* Write a poem. I know, I know. I mentioned this in my last week’s post about what you can do in 30 minutes. But truthfully, you can write a draft of a poem in 15 minutes. I do it all the time. It’s a draft. It’s rough. But I can go back and revise and revise again (in other 15 minute spurts). My current WIP is a novel in verse, so I am finding it is possible to break it up into smaller chunks.

* Revise a poem. (See above)

* Shrink your manuscript. Darcy Pattison recommends doing an revision technique called “The Shrunken Manuscript.” In 15 minutes you can’t revise your whole novel. But, you can reformat your manuscript into a shrunken manuscript  and print it out for a day when you have a longer period of time to actually revise and make notes.

* Color-code/Highlight your picture book manuscript. Ann Whitford Paul’s book Writing Picture Books, gives great advice for analyzing the elements of your picture book using colored highlighters. She calls it “Color Testing the Dummy.” The “dummy” refers to the mock-up book you make of your picture book manuscript where you test out pagination and other key elements. You can “color test the dummy” in 15 minutes.

* Complete a “Creep Emergency Antidote.” Heather Sellers refers to these in her book Chapter After Chapter.

When you get discouraged, it’s easy to step away from your book and let doubt set in. She says you must “tether yourself to the book everyday.” When you feel those doubts creep up, pull up one of your “creep emergency antidotes.” These are writing tasks related to the novel at hand that you write up ahead of time on index cards. It’s something simple that you can do in a 15 minute stretch that keeps you with your book. I have mine handwritten on index cards in an old envelope box. This has been especially useful to me during really busy times in my life when I know I will only have 15 minutes a day to work on my book. When I know life is going to be busy, I create twenty or thirty cards with tasks written out related to my book. Then each time I feel that sinking feeling that I don’t have time to work on my book, I pull one out.

* Write to a writing prompt. Are you stuck in your writing? I have a few great places to get you unstuck:

1) Miss Rumphius Effect’s Monday Poetry Stretch—She gives a brief explanation of a type of poem each Monday and challenges her readers to write a poem.

2) Teachers Write Prompts on Kate Messner’s site. This summer Kate Messner and several other children’s and young adult writers hosted Teachers Write. They posted writing prompts, revision ideas, and more. You don’t have to be a teacher to find it useful.

3) WFMAD—Write Fifteen Minutes a Day. Laurie Halse Anderson hosts WFMAD on her blog every August. Every day she posts a prompt that can be completed in 15 minutes. I know it’s not August, but the prompts are still available for you to peruse.

When I e-mail my critique group and whine about how I only got one or two poems written in that day and how much more I have to go, they always pick me up and dust me off through cyberspace. They keep reminding me about that story in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Her brother had a project to complete for school on birds. He had no idea how he was going to get it done. Their father said they would take it “bird by bird.”

So everyday, even if I only have 15 minutes, I tackle my writing work “bird by bird.”