The Only Way to Write (Like You're Running Out of Time)

"How do you write like you're running out of time?  How do you write like tomorrow won't arrive?"
Alexander Hamilton's creative process astounds me.  I often wonder what made it so easy for the treasury secretary to spill words onto paper, especially considering that I would likely spill the bottle of ink before finishing one page.
Hamilton had internal and external motivations to write, the revolutionary war, and his political involvement and successes being the main ones.

I have much different ones, obviously: the knowledge that accomplishment will feel good, the joy of growing word counts (even when I edit away 30% of what I write), and feedback from those who read what I write.  Unfortunately, I think the only things that have a 100% success rate in motivating me to write are looming deadlines.  If it doesn't have a date on a calendar, odds are that it won't be a priority.  This means that college writing assignments get done on time. Always. They have to, after all.

Any creative writing pursuits, though, those are the ones that get pushed off.  Between reading and writing, I'm used to choosing the book.  Between blogging and working on my own story, well, here I am, nice to see you here as well.

When it's winter and I escape to the bookshelf-surrounded couch in our basement, hot chocolate in hand, writing seems to come easily. This phase lasts roughly from Thanksgiving to New Year's and dies a painful death along with my joy for life once spring semester begins. Between March and October, I don't think I wrote anything that wasn't academic.  It was weird.  I missed it.
I think the reason I have a hard time with it is because writing is simultaneously my most relaxing and most difficult hobby.  I just got back into my story recently (I'll refer to it as The Story for now).

The Story has the potential to be novel length, and will be the second piece of fiction I've ever written.  I never realized how much fun it could be to write what you want to read.  On the other hand, writing is a grind.  I give props to the people who make it through NaNoWriMo (writing 50,000 words in the month of November), because my record word count in a single day is around 1,300 words.

But I go back the next time and write 800.  When I have a few spare minutes, maybe I get 150 words.  And then 500, and 257, and 48 here, and 386 more that I typed into a note on my phone before I forgot the idea.

Sometimes it's barely a sprinkle of words, other times it's a flood.

How do you write like you're running out of time?

You write.  Period.

Happy writing!

- Grace