Café Kashi in Cochin, Kerala, South India – one of my favorite hangouts.
Vivienne M. Sharma
Tom J. has been fired. He still gets up in the morning at 6 am, has a shower, starts dressing and leaves the house in a suit. The embarrassment of telling his wife and kids is so high that he rather spends the whole day at the employment office. He also goes to Starbucks every day for two hours. Tom has a dream: He wants to be writer. Even though he is a bit worried about his finances he buys a new laptop and gathers information about writing workshops.
When you are in the workforce and have a full packed diary there’s nothing you desire more than a day without meetings and conference calls. You would like to have days where you can get into and remain in a creative flow for more than two minutes and where you can freely decide when to take your coffee break or lunch.
Tom found out after a few weeks that job search is a full-time job. Still he has some time now during the day to consider what he really wants to do. He realizes how hard it is to create your own world. Your motivation has to come from within and not from your boss or from your diary that he used to follow like it was the holy bible.
When you decide that you want to lead a self-determined life you need to learn to master yourself and take responsibility for your actions a lot more than in the past. Every success you can attribute to yourself but every failure as well. If you do not manage to understand your readers you might be delivering a result that is mediocre. Tom also realized how much he had to learn. Then he planned to spend about three hours with free flow writing every week. It works for a few weeks and Tom has a manuscript ready.
Then a new day job comes along. The efforts of finding a job have been worth while. Tom needs the income to sustain his family.
Suddenly the three hours are used for operational day to day activities again. On the weekends Tom wants to spend time with his family. He still has his dream but somehow he is not pursuing it the way he wants to. So he puts the manuscripts in a drawer and postpones his dream for another year…
How do you make time for writing?
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