How to Finish Your Book Despite Your Day Job

Do you sometimes wonder what it would take for you to get any writing done? Perhaps a permanent move to a tropical island? Or maybe a six month, all-expenses-paid writer's retreat to a little cottage in the country, with a roaring fire and a well-stocked pantry? Just imagine it.
Six months away from the Day Job Monster and the many distractions of daily life, and your novel would practically write itself.
Come to think of it, under these conditions, you could probably get halfway through the draft of another one too.
But until you find a way to spend half of every year on the French Rivera, you're probably looking for a more practical approach to making progress on your writing.
Surprisingly, the solution is snoring gently under your desk.
And OK, spending time with a Day Job Monster is not quite like taking a holiday.
But it can still really benefit your writing career.
Because a day job offers extreme time management training.
And the training starts with a super-sized serving of motivation.
Who else but the Monster could offer such an incentive to keep working on your dream? If you don't, after all, you may be stuck with him for years! That's a pretty powerful reason to fill a page with ideas over your morning coffee.
Or find a quiet park bench to develop chapter three of your novel over a sandwich at lunchtime.
This motivation lesson is followed by actual opportunities to write around your job.
The Monster provides a series of chances to achieve your writing goals while you earn a pay check.
He presents you with sanctioned, ordered, scheduled periods in which to write.
Like your morning and afternoon break, lunch time, and on the train in the morning, for example.
The day job offers a bottomless well of material as well.
Think about it: you're surrounded all day with the kinds of people you would certainly never meet in your real life.
What can they tell you about the human condition? How can they contribute to the depth and credibility of the characters in your fiction? Holding down a day job when you're really a writer provides serious training in how to be more practical about writing.
And yes, the training is pretty brutal.
But it does teach you to get proactive about seizing every possible writing opportunity that comes your way.
And to expect little flashes of inspiration and ideas in the most unlikely places.
Of course, you could decide to just put your writing on hold until the pace of your life slows down.
Or until you book time on a remote tropical paradise.
But who knows when those kinds of miracles might happen? A better solution to finishing your work in progress is to give it top priority right now.
That means looking for writing opportunities every single day, even though the writing conditions at a day job are far from ideal.
They certainly won't involve cocktails on the beach.
But that's OK.
A day job will still let you get something done on your real work.
Let the Monster teach you about motivation, structured writing periods, and even inspiration.
And then use that priceless knowledge to make sure your manuscript gets bigger and bigger every week.
Island getaway optional.