Schedule Your Writing Time (Yes, Really Put It on the Calendar)

If you've been telling yourself you'll write your memoir "when things calm down," I have some bad news: things rarely calm down. Life stays full. The laundry keeps needing to be folded, the inbox keeps refilling, and the story you've been carrying around in your head stays right where it is—unwritten.

The biggest obstacle most memoir writers face isn't a lack of material or talent. It's simply sitting down and writing. And the fix for that is almost embarrassingly simple: schedule it.

Treat your writing time the way you'd treat a doctor's appointment or a call with your best friend. Open your calendar right now and block off 15 to 30 minutes. That's it—you don't need to carve out a free Saturday afternoon or wait for a two-week vacation. Small, consistent windows of time beat big, sporadic ones every time, because habits are built on repetition, not intensity.

Pick a time that fits into your life as it already exists. Maybe it's the first 20 minutes after your coffee, or the half hour after the kids are in bed. The exact time matters less than the fact that it's the same time, showing up on your calendar as a non-negotiable appointment with yourself.

Here's the part people skip: keeping the date once you've made it. It's easy to schedule writing time and then let it slide the moment something "more urgent" comes up. But your story is worth defending on your calendar. Every time you honor that appointment, you're telling yourself—and your future readers—that this story matters enough to make room for it.

So before you exit out of this article, do this one thing: open your calendar app or planner and pencil in your first writing session. A specific day, a specific time, for 15 to 30 minutes.

That's how every memoir gets written—not in one heroic burst, but one scheduled session at a time.

Want more tips to help you get your memoir started? Download my free guide, The Memoir Writing Quick-Start Guide.