From the Fiction Desk

You read in all the advice books and magazine articles that it is critical to keep your writing time sacrosanct, not letting anything interfere with it, no matter what. This is a lesson that is very hard to learn. As a part time writer with the determination to turn this part time career into a full time one, I find this to be extremely difficult to master. It is not the concept, but the timing. It could be the bill paying job that I have—which puts me at the mercy of not only the company whim on time, but also at the whim of outside attorneys, courts, the Federal Government, and two State Governments. If it was not for the skills of time management that I have learned, I would not be able to do my job nevertheless think about writing.

Yet with determination I still steal time to write. Sometimes this is not too hard, but lately it has been a task to make Heracles whistle in admiration despite his own twelve labors. It seems my writing schedule is much like the taunting of Tantalus, just out of reach. To even begin to ponder writing, I am having to sacrifice time with family, friends, even outside activities (such as fitness and martial arts), and sleep (food, other things too).

Despite my tribulations, the fact is that these advisors of time management are correct. To grow and to achieve as a craftsman of words, you do have to keep honor and keep sacred your writing time. It is in the method of execution that grants the writer flexibility in doing it. How do I do it?

1. I set my goals months in advance and on a daily basis
2. I take everything I am doing and prioritize it in two ways—as I learned by attending a Franklin Covey seminar.

I give everything a letter A-D. A is top priority and must be done immediately. B is for those important priorities that must be done, but are not immediate. C is reserved for those things that are important, but are not more important than the B list. D is for the “Trash” (my term). D is for all those things that are stopping me from achieved my As and Bs.

With this list of “lettered priorities” I then continue to number them in importance. In other words, I take all my As and number them, then my Bs and so forth. My Ds should have been eliminated.

Then I start to work.
3. Next I turn off the phone, the internet—I don’t even write at home so I would have to worry about the TV, my cat, or people stopping by.
4. Then I work though my list…

This doesn’t always keep me from having to sacrifice my writing time, but it helps keep it at the forefront so that I know when I sacrificed it, it was for a good justifiable reason.

Thank you for reading and please visit www.davidalanlucas.com for blogs and updates to my articles, short stories, novels, and novellas that I am writing.