The most common excuse I hear for someone not writing is they don’t have the time. We all know time is in short supply. Our days are full of work, family, and all the commitments we’ve made to other people. How do we find time for ourselves?

First you have to decide if it’s important. Would you rather be getting those 6 or 8 hours of sleep a night? Watch 3 or 4  hours of TV? Or lock yourself in your office and struggle to put words on paper?

For most of my life I’ve been a writer. I’ve poured tens of thousands of word on paper or into my computer. I’ve read dozens of books about writing and gleaned what I could from them. I learned to write anywhere. My habit was to always have pens and paper in my bag, along with a book and pull it out when I sat down someplace. A lunch table, a bar, the passenger seat of a car — I ever learned how to scribble ideas down while I was behind the wheel, writing without looking at the page. I was probably the only one would could have read those scratches.

A writer needs to figure out what can be juggled on their already full schedule. The best way to become a writer is to allot X number of hours a day to put toward writing. Now, this doesn’t mean every one of those moments has to be used to the act of physical writing. Most books or stories I write take nearly as much time thinking about the book, doing the research I need, and most of my books are either police procedurals where I have to get the police details right, to my current work on an historical novel set in the 1920s. Hours of my time have been spent researching the minutiae of the late roaring twenties. The actual writing of the novel I’m calling Color of Shadows and Smoke only started a month or more of digging through all the data I unearthed on that period.

I started writing the actual novel at the very beginning of March. By March’s end I had just over 40,000 words. The majority of those words came in the last 2 weeks. Before that I was struggling. I knew the story, I knew what I wanted to do with it, but the words wouldn’t come.

How did I fix that? I changed my priorities around. I’m a TV hound. I will put it on in the morning and let it run all day, sometimes not even changing channels or watching what was on very much. But it was on, and even if I only glanced at it for a few minutes every hour, that adds up. One day I did’t turn the TV on. I left it on and wrote. Suddenly I’m writing reams. I do 3,000, 5,000 even 9,000 at one point over a 24 hour period.

So to answer my own question, I will now say I will give up TV while I’m writing. Sometimes the only way to make this job choice possible is to get up an hour early, go to bed an hour later. Block some time out and let the family and friends know no to disturb you. It can mean turning off your cellphone. Staying off the Internet. I’m guilty of the latter. I continually go in and check my email. Playing around on Facebook or Twitter might be useful to new writers, but if they interfere with the writing time you need then they are distractions you don’t need.

Being a professional writer (even if you don’t quit your day job) requires first and foremost discipline. The discipline to sit in front of your computer and pound out words. Talking about writing will get you nowhere. Neither will dreaming about it. You have to get down and do it. It will mean sacrifices. There is no two ways about it. We have 24 hours. You have to carve some of that time out to write and then doing it. No excuses. The dishes can wait, the kids can find something to amuse themselves, the books you want to read must stay on your TBR pile. The phone must go unanswered.

Everybody gets the same amount of time. And the funny thing about time, is we always fill it. There’s always going to be something that has to be done, obligations such as work and family — although I have been known to jot ideas down during work hours. And of course, there are always lunch breaks and other daily breaks. But everybody has some flexible time. How we allot that time is at our discretion. If you have to wait for your kids at soccer practice or in the dentists office, those times can be put to use if you are prepared with paper and pen, or a recorder. If we want some of that time to write, then we have to carve it out and give it to ourselves.

Decide if writing is worth finding the time. Decide how badly you want it. Then make the time to do it. The choices are yours. what will you give up to be a writer?

What do Annie Proulx, Neil Plakcy, John Varley and Arthur Golden have in common?

They all write about places and people diametrically opposed to what they are.

Annie Proulx, a thrice divorced woman with three sons and a daughter, wrote the multi award winning short story Brokeback Mountain, a story about two Wyoming ranch hands who work together one summer and become reluctant lovers, a love affair that goes on in secret for years, neither man able to speak of the love they have. Annie Proulx is a) not a man b) not gay c) not a ranch hand. Yet her writing won awards and went on to become an iconic film that won awards all over the world, including Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Director’s Guild awards.

Neil Plakcy is another award winning author who has written a series of books about Kimo Kanapa’aka, a mixed Hawaiian-Japanese-Chinese-Haole homicide detective in the Honolulu Police Department. Now I’ve met Neil, he’s a wonderful, talented man, but he’s not a) a cop b) Hawaiian, Japanese or Chinese c) does nor nor has he ever lived in Hawaii (he lives in Florida) But his books are wonderful and I’ve never heard of anyone taking exception to his skill in writing about the place or the man.

John Varley is a Hugo Award winning white Texan who wrote some remarkable books set on a goddess made world called Gaea. His characters in that series ranged from a bi-sexual black female ship’s captain turned wizard called Cirocco Jones, and impossibly, bizarre creatures out of legend like centaurs and flying angels.

Arthur Golden is a middle-aged, Jewish American man who authored the critically acclaimed Memoirs of a Geisha, a story about a young, Japanese girl who was raised/trained to be a geisha girl.

How can these people, so different from the characters they portray do it? Is it wrong for them to try? Is it wrong for a white person to write about a black, a male to write from a woman’s POV? Someone who lives on the east coast to write about the west coast, or an American to write about a Chinese character living in 4th Century China? Are there lines that writers shouldn’t cross in their stories? And if there are, who draws those lines?

My books all deal with gay men living in modern America, in most cases in Los Angeles, a city I did live in once, but haven’t visited in over twenty years. My most recent book, not yet published is about a young Latino man from a gang ridden barrio in South Central Los Angeles. As I wrote it, I wondered if I was going to get flack for writing about a world I have never lived in, so in the last while I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I’ve come to some conclusions. I know I’ve been criticised for writing about L.A. since I don’t live there now. And all of us who are female and write gay male fiction face the criticism that we have no business doing so. Is there any merit to what those critics say?

Personally I’m of the mind that as writers we are supposed to delve into worlds and people we don’t know, in some cases can never know. This is the nature of good fiction. Tame books, told about everyday lives, can be good literature, but for me that’s not what I want in my books. I want to explore new places, from new POVs in a way that allows me to live them vicariously. My final argument about this way of thinking is that there would be no science fiction, no fantasy and no historical books, since all those require the writer to step outside of their comfort zone and put themselves in another’s shoes. Our bookshelves would be a lot lighter and less interesting if we followed those rules.

I also think, that as long as we invest in the research and don’t succumb to stereotypes, that I want the freedom to write the stories that come to me. I use the Internet on a daily basis to not only find out about people and places, but I use Google Maps and their Street View to see what a neighborhood looks like. I’m lucky in that L.A is one of the first cities to have its streets mapped. I’ve also invested several hundred dollars over the years in books about police procedure, bios of active gang members, and I have built up contacts within both the LAPD and people who are considered gang experts. I can tap these, as well as some L.A. friends, who can help me keep my facts true. It must work, I’ve had more than one compliment on how I make L.A. live and so far, not one taking me to task for getting it wrong. Finally, I devour any and all books and movies I can find set in Los Angeles.

What do you do to ‘keep it real’? Do you write about places or people unlike your own? Do you think there are things we shouldn’t write about?

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