Are you guilty of saying, “I don’t have time to write”? Our students, often burdened by coursework, family obligations, jobs, and other time-consuming activities, come into the creative writing classroom saying the same thing. I use contract grading, which means students have to log five hours of work a week outside of class time to achieve an A. Students often believe they don’t have time to do that much work.
To counter the time-deprived mentality, I developed the following assignment.
1. Every day for one week, track how you spend your time. It’s tempting when tracking time to behave in a way you think is “better,” but that won’t really help you. There are blocks of time you can’t change (class time, work shifts), but there are many you can, and that’s what I want to help you do.
2. Use this chart to show how that time was used. I suggest 15-30-minute intervals.
3. Do some math. Make a list that shows how your 168 hours for the week were used. For example: 18 hours writing; 10 hours working out; 5 hours personal hygiene; 10 hours video games; 10 hours class time; 15 hours homework.
4. Write A Plan. Your schedule may change week to week. In your plan, you can tell me and yourself (after all, it’s for you to follow, not for me to be impressed by) that you will spend 20 minutes every Sunday of the semester scheduling five hours of writing time for the upcoming week. I also want to know, in the plan, what you hope to accomplish this semester. Do you want to work on a certain craft element? Do you hope to write a short story? Make this class a useful time for you, maybe even a time you can look back on and say, “Yes, that’s when I got serious about my writing.”
5. Keep track of how you’re doing weekly in your journal. Keep the plan nearby and review it regularly. How are you progressing? At midterm I’m going to ask you to evaluate your progress as well as how you want to change your plan. These journal entries will help make this task easier.
Remember, there are no right or wrong answers. Each of you may have unique goals. I want you to have a plan to achieve those goals.
This endeavor often reveals to students that they do, in fact, have time to write if they choose to make it more important than some other activity. A student who reported watching 32 hours of Netflix produced several chapters of a memoir when she swapped watching for writing. Another student, the father of a toddler and a newborn, realized that his commute to campus gave him a daily hour to record poetry drafts onto his phone. Vital to any writer’s life is fitting in time to write. This assignment gives writers the opportunity to see exactly when they might find that time.
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Beverly Army Williams is a writer and a writing teacher at Westfield State University. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The Dandelion Review, and Project 333 among other places. She serves on the board of Perugia Press and holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of New Mexico.