I’ve heard people say that they don’t have time to write, or that they’ve found time to write, finally, now that school is over or their kids have gone off to college when they could’ve started much earlier. I’ve heard people say that they don’t have time to write because their jobs have bogged them down. If they just had time, they would begin writing that novel they’ve been thinking about every day for ten years.

The days are long, so long that I find myself trying to do something with my free time. I go for walks, but I can only walk so far before I get bored and tired. And yet my free time is still available. Maybe that’s just me, and other people really don’t have free time. But they complain that they don’t have the time to create, and I tell them to find time, whether it’s at one in the afternoon or one in the morning. They’ll find themselves with nothing to do. And what do they do with that time? They watch television, the devil’s invention, because they’re too tired from work or parenting or both, or they were out too late last night partying, and they’re trying to recuperate.

Meanwhile, time keeps passing by, collecting seconds and minutes and hours. Just a little each day goes far: one hour today, one hour tomorrow, two hours the next day and so on. It’s up to them what they choose to do with their time. And yes, things take a while to develop. It took me seven years to write my first manuscript. It didn’t go anywhere. It’s still on my shelf, and I don’t plan to do anything with it because it was really my first crack at a novel. My first actual manuscript was really a draft. It was never finished. It needed several subsequent drafts for me to really develop. That took me like a year if I can remember. That was over fifteen years ago.

I remember around then I was writing short stories and wasn’t planning to take them anywhere. A friend hooked me up with an editor when I was in my early thirties. She looked at the copy and refused to work on it because she was afraid she would charge me too much. That was how much work was needed to be done with it. She said it was too raw and gave me the ten-thousand-hour speech. I’d already heard about the ten thousand hours. I think I’ve exceeded them by now. But anyway, it deprressed me to hear her say that, but it didn’t discourage me from continuing. I kept writing after that rejection, and eventually I got started on that first manuscript.

I sent it out to about forty-nine agents, and several of them rejected me. Actually, all of them rejected me because when I didn’t hear back from them, it might as well have been qualified as a rejection. It depressed me, but I could at least say I did it. This was after my psychiatrist yelled at me for not going out there and doing the hard work myself, because a family friend said he would help me, but he never did.

“He doesn’t care about you,” my psychiatrist said, and that was true. The family friend really didn’t. Otherwise, he would’ve really helped me. The point my psychiatrist was trying to make was that I would have to do all the heavy lifting, and no one was going to help, no matter how close that person was to my family.

I think a lot of people are afraid of that sort of pain, so they make excuses so as not to work toward their artistic visions. Therefore, they let themselves off the hook and blame other factors, even other people. In the end, the blame takes them nowhere. All the time they’d spent making excuses could’ve been more time spent creating. I could be wrong in all of this, but I think I’m right.