Finding time to write is often cited as a problem by budding writers. Many people with a desire to write don’t have the time they would like to have for various reasons. It may be work, family, or a number of other life events that get in the way. But even people who seemingly have an abundance of time still complain they do not have time to focus on writing.

I’d like to make the argument here that perhaps it is not the actual “time” the writer needs to locate, but rather the “intention” to write that a writer needs to come up with. What I am saying here is that writing can be done in small chunks, five minutes here, half an hour there, but in most cases a writer won’t use these daily moments to advance a story, poem or essay. These non-writing writers believe they need some special time, perhaps an extended period of time, in order to write something meaningful. While I totally understand this desire, I also advocate trying to keep a piece of writing progressing even if you only have a few minutes at various times during the day.

The key point is not just finding time, but finding “intent”. Finding the intention or intent to write is probably more important than finding time. If you have the intent you will be thinking of your story, making notes, carrying crumpled pages around and jotting ideas and sentences down during the day. As Philip Roth once said about constructing his novels, he concerns himself with the sentence, the paragraph, the page. I think what Roth was getting at was building a story one word and sentence at a time.

Yes, having uninterrupted time to write is a blessing, but having the intention to write is the magic-fairy-dust that can make your writing dreams become real.