"I just don't have the time."

I have heard the excuse time and time again. I, myself, have even made the excuse before. It is what we writers do. We spend all day browsing Tumblr or Pinterest. Pinning all of the most beautiful landscape photos and stock photos of characters. We daydream in class about all of the fight scenes, the beginning scenes, the end scenes, and those special scenes. But then when we get back to our rooms at night, we sit there watching TV or scrolling again through Pinterest. It is a vicious cycle, that we all fall incredibly guilty to.

When we sit back and then wonder when we ever are going to get published, the only one at fault is ourselves. When we don't make time to write, our characters get bored. They sit down on the battlefield. They leave that cozy beach. They get bored and go off to someone else's head, someone else's idea. Then that book gets published, and you sit there and go. That sounds just like mine. It was yours. Until you took an eternity to finally write the first paragraph.

This happens, but it is preventable. Make the time to write. Sit yourself down in the morning, middle of the day, or at night. Set a timer on your phone that says, "WRITE." Make the time. Put it in your schedule as if it is a class you have to go to each day for 50 minutes. Thirty minutes if that is just too much. Just write.

I have found that the only way to cure your writer's block or to get that book finished is to actually apply yourself to your goals. if it means that much to you, wouldn't you find the time to do that thing you love? Life happens, for sure. But when it becomes apart of your routine, life can be happening all around you and this could be the one time a day that you go to stress-free.

Start by writing about your characters. Then start their introduction scenes. Start their love story. Start their fight. Introduce their hopes, ambitions, fears, and scars. Write scenes that are the least important. Write scenes that are the most important. Write scenes that the readers of your books will never get to read. Build the world that is in your head to allow space for other things. Then in that one moment of your day, you write you can only have to think about that one thing.

Just write. For the sake of all the other writers out there, just write. Get your story heard. We sit in fan clubs and meet our favorite authors. We tell them that we want to be just like them. But we don't apply the same discipline they've applied to get themselves where they are. Their book getting published wasn't handed to them on a silver plate. They wrote every single day until their hands became numb. They wrote until they couldn't think of anything else to write.

They poured their hearts and souls out into these stories. But all they had to do was first write.