Okay, all the stuff I’m about to say? I don’t necessarily endorse any of it. This was a weird situation that’s kind of hard to replicate in any reputable company. But writers with full-time jobs have to find time to write wherever they can and, well…

I used to write my novels and blog posts at work.

Don’t do that. DO NOT DO THAT. Unless you’re in a situation as weird as mine was. Normally, writing on the job is stealing from your company. You could be spending your time doing any kind of miscellaneous work.

However, I worked a certain job of which I’m pretty sure I’m forbidden to speak. That sounds a lot more fun than it is. And more lucrative.

Anywho on this job, the company was a sad mixture of unable, ill-equipped, and inept. The result? Entire days would go by when there was NO WORK TO DO.

I’m not exaggerating. If one particular system was down, updating, or having a weird day, that was it. Everything was dependent on a single system. Every. Last. Task. There were no papers to file, no work that required you to leave your desk, and they never just sent us home. We were to sit there and do nothing. And get paid for it. Paid. To do NOTHING.

So…I wrote. Email was still up, so I’d write ideas out, then email them to myself. While my colleagues sat around and talked, I hashed out tens of thousands of words in the two years I worked there. I probably wrote the equivalent of one whole novel, not to mention blog ideas. I even started whole new stories at work.

Instinct says this is wrong, right? But I would simply reply, “They were literally paying me to play see-how-long-you-can-spin-in-your-chair-before-you-throw-up.” It’s not just that we couldn’t work sometimes, there were times we were actually not allowed to work. 

Why, no, this was not a great company.

So all this week, I’ve been clearing out old archives of stories and planting them in MS Word. I’m down to a dozen emails for a single story series and probably fifty more for other random projects.

Yes! It was that bad!

Extreme situation, yes, but writers write whenever they find time. And if your company wants to pay you to be unproductive, they clearly have no place to judge you for actually doing something.

WRITERS, what’s the worst way you’ve ever squeezed in time to write? How do you find time to write normally?