When to write

I've talked before about, and it's fairly easy to see by what time I upload, how I tend to do most of my writing at night, before I go to bed. You might be able to guess that that's not necessarily the best time to be writing, and you would be guessing right. I can't begin to describe the number of times that my writing feels hampered or slowed by how tired I am. I should be able to, because I'm a writer, but that's a different point entirely.

Everyone has an optimum time for everything. Optimum times don't always work out for people, however. That's why we have coffee and energy drinks, both of which are things I don't enjoy for a variety of reasons and thus tend to stay away from. The solution, therefore, should be to find that optimum time for writing and figure out how to incorporate it into my day, or plan my day around it, whichever is more achievable. However, I have problems with consistency. One of the many reasons I made the blog. And even besides that, every time seems to have its own problem.

When I wake up in the morning, I'm groggy, as most people would tend to be I would assume, and I can't really think straight. So I take some time off, do some other stuff that don't take a lot of brain power and get me going into the day. However, once I get going on those kinds of things, I find it difficult to stop. I burn my way through the day, constantly thinking about how I should be writing, but I never do because I want to get done with whatever it is I'm doing at the time first, and by the time I've finished, I've already forgotten about what I wanted to be writing. Even when I do start to write earlier on in the day, I think to myself that hey, I started early, I can take a break. After all, I have the whole day to get my writing done. So I go off to do something else, and I have the same trouble all over again. And that happens in and out until the day is drawing to a close.

I've tried to write despite the distractions. Despite the way I feel. I've written in good times and bad, and it's hard to say how much of an impact any of it has had on the writing itself. There are a number of pieces which I hate, and other people enjoy, and a number of pieces that I absolutely love, and no one else could give two shits about. It's hard to judge how much of that is personal preference, how much is reader/writer bias, how much is when I write, how much is what I write - all sorts of issues.

All things considered, however, I do find that the best time to write for me is when there can be some quiet. That's not always a consistent thing, and it's not really something you can depend on happening. But when there is quiet, and you can be alone with your thoughts, you are more likely to get a flow, rather than a stop and go struggle.

The worst thing about trying to find a time to write is that it may not even be the same for you from day to day. It may not be a time that you want to be doing your writing. But if you're going to a writer, you have to suck it up and write. Through the good times and the bad. When you're less motivated to do anything, much less write, and when you want to spend days at a time doing nothing but writing. And you never know when you're going to get the best results. So you just have to keep writing, and trying to tell yourself that you should be writing, and making yourself write when you should be writing.

Sooner or later you're going to end up with the piece that you've been waiting for. And like it or not, it's probably not going to happen when you want it to.