You know exactly when you’ll write the book.
You will write soon. You know soon, don’t you? The one which never comes, like tomorrow.
Look back on your life. Was there ever a time when you had plenty of time to do something, AND the inclination to do it in the same time frame? I ask because I’ve never had such a time.
I was either waiting for a breather from the mad rush of my life, or I had some time but the thought of stringing two sentences together filled me with deep tiredness.
I didn’t give up. I was just waiting for the right time.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the right time.
Life is alive. It keeps moving, keeps demanding, keeps replacing one season of chaos with another. The demanding job becomes a demanding retirement. The young children become complicated teenagers. The house gets sorted and your parents need looking after.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the book waits.
The lie hiding inside the reasonable plan
Waiting for the right conditions feels responsible. Mature, even. You’re not going to produce something half-hearted. You respect the work too much for that. When you write the book, you’re going to do it properly—with time, and space, and the full weight of your attention.
That instinct is not wrong. The book deserves your full attention.
But waiting keeps the book perfect and unwritten inside your head, while the years outside your head keep moving. You realize one day, that you shouldn’t have waited. That you could have done it, made time for it.
The writer who waits for silence will wait a long time. Life isn’t quiet; it is restless and moving. The writers whose books changed your life did not write them in ideal conditions. They wrote them around the edges of demanding lives, in stolen hours, in the gaps between one crisis and the next.
The conditions weren’t perfect but they decided the conditions were right enough.
What writing in imperfect conditions actually looks like
A client of mine wrote a 90,000-word thought-leadership book while working a punishing full-time job in a metro city. His commute was an hour each way. His weekends were rarely his own. His father was hospitalised midway through the writing.
He wrote on the metro. He recorded voice notes. He once wrote a chapter outline on a paper towel in a restaurant restroom because an idea struck him at lunch and he couldn’t let it go.
At month six he stopped. The manuscript felt like a mess. He went a month without writing anything.
Then he remembered why he was writing—the life he was trying to build, the bridge the book would become—and he started again.
Twelve months after he began, he had a finished manuscript. Eight months after the book was published, he quit his job.
The conditions never improved. What changed was his relationship to them.
The question worth sitting with
If you’re waiting for things to settle, ask yourself honestly: when, in the last five years, have things actually settled? Was it long enough to write a book?
If the answer is no—and for most people it is—then the calm you’re waiting for is not the solution. It is the postponement dressed up as a plan.
The book does not need perfect conditions. It needs a decision. You commit to work with what you have and start from where you are.
Grand declarations and overhauled schedules make noise, not progress. You just need a small, stubborn decision: I will write today. Today, in the life I have, I will put something on the page.
Set a timer. Write for exactly five minutes, or ten if you are feeling adventurous. Write whatever comes to you. Don’t sit planning the thing to death!
That decision, made repeatedly, is how books get written. When you commit to write and jot down some haphazard thoughts… totally unconnected with each other… you have just kicked-started your long unused, rusty mental engine. It will splutter and spit for a while. But it will get clear and smooth within a couple of days. And the joy you will feel when that happens! Oh, man!
The smallest possible session
Here is a practical question worth answering before you close this page: what is the smallest writing session you could fit into your actual life right now?
Twenty/ten/five minutes on your lunch break. Thirty minutes after everyone is asleep. The commute, one way. A voice note in the car?
It doesn’t have to be brilliant. It doesn’t have to be continuous. It has to be something—because something can be worked with, and nothing cannot.
The perfect time to write is not coming. But the book can still get written.
If you have a manuscript you’ve been postponing—or a book that lives only in your head—come and talk about it. Every week I sit with a small group of writers on Google Meet. It’s called Pen to Print. We look at whatever is stuck and figure out what to do next. It’s free for members of my writing community, The Write Place.
The door is open.
Mother of three adult, opinionated humans. An idealistic, outspoken woman of scrupulous integrity. Editor, coach, ghostwriter and storyteller.
And a passionate bibliophile, of course.