Starting Small and Making Time by Missy Springsteen Haupt

If you had asked me ten years ago if I was a writer, I would have said no.

There might have been some shame in my response, as a then 3rd-year English teacher aware that she wasn’t practicing what she preached. There most definitely would have been some defensiveness in the response, questioning how any teacher could find the time to be a writer.

The classroom teacher’s battle against time is one of those epic struggles right up there with Batman versus The Joker. We never really win. Sometimes the pressure makes us better. Sometimes it defeats us.

I don’t know how you find the time.
It’s one of the things I hear most often when talking with other teachers about writing.

Sometimes it’s delivered with awe: That’s amazing, how do you do it? 

Sometimes it can feel like an insult: You must not have enough responsibilities if you have time for that. 

It is almost always delivered with a sense of wistfulness: I wish I could.

I still haven’t found a good way to respond to that statement. You can, I promise you can, I want to say.

Writing matters, especially when we are teachers of writers, so we have to make time.

Instead of setting big goals or tasks for teachers who want to discover their writer-selves again, my advice is to make time. Start small. The fifteen minutes you spend mindlessly scrolling through social media while decompressing from the day? Replace it with writing time. Five minutes before you go to bed, commit to writing two or three sentences about your day in a journal. Most of my daily prewriting happens in my head during my morning workout. When my students write during class, I write with them.

Beginning the writing habit does not have to be sitting down to start a novel, or committing to a blog, or even creating anything good enough to share with an audience. It just means that you begin. Once the first sentence is down, that’s it: You’re a writer again.

And after you start the habit, you’ll be amazed at how you find the time where you thought it didn’t exist before.



Missy Springsteen-Haupt teaches middle school language arts at Clarion-Goldfield-Dows Middle School in Clarion, Iowa. She blogs about teaching and writer’s workshop at themrshauptsteen.weebly.com and on Twitter @missyhauptsteen.