Three 90-minute blocks a week. If you don’t have time for those, you’re not really a writer.

The difference between real writers and pretend “writers” who are just fooling themselves comes down to one thing:

Concentration.

If you have time to concentrate on the writing you create, you will get better and better. You will be able to think big enough to conceive and assemble a book. It also helps if you have a worthwhile idea and good research skills, of course, but I stand by the generalization: writers concentrate, and people who don’t concentrate aren’t writers.

Audit your schedule

I encourage you to think about 90-minute blocks that are dedicated to writing.

You can do important writing work in less than 90 minutes — corresponding with contacts, research, and editing what you wrote — but I maintain that it takes 90 minutes of concentration to produce quality writing passages of more than 2,000 words. You need uninterrupted continuity of thought to identify what you want to say, attempt to say it, adjust what you wrote, think carefully about what you wrote, and polish it into a finished draft.

You can’t assemble that out of 30-minute slivers here and there. You’ll lose your concentration and flow. You need 90 minutes.

Examine your weekly work schedule. Look at the last two weeks and the two weeks coming up. How many uninterrupted blocks of at least 90 minutes are there in your regular working hours, times that are not dedicated to meetings?

If you tend to undermine yourself in those 90-minute segments by reading email, checking social media, or taking care of other work tasks that are hanging over you, then they don’t count. I’m only talking about blocks of time you can and actually do dedicate to nothing but writing.

And lunch doesn’t count, unless you are skipping eating your lunch to write.

Review the number of 90-minute writing blocks in the four weeks in question, then divide by four. If the result is less than one block per week, you are not a writer, at least not yet. You can’t succeed by just imagining you will write.

If the result is one or two blocks per week, you are a slow writer. Your progress will be painstaking, and you’ll waste time re-connecting with the context of what you were doing.

If you have three or more 90-minute blocks, you can call yourself a writer.

I know there are people who write in the early morning before others begin working, in the evening, or on weekends. You can count those blocks if you want. But it’s hard to keep dedicating parts of your free time to writing when you really deserve to be relaxing. If you can get to three blocks a week with these extra hours figured in, you may be a writer — but you may be damaging your family and other relationships or your health to be one.

What to do if you don’t have three 90-minute blocks per week

If you don’t have these times to write, your choices are these:

1. Admit that you’re not a writer right now, and that you might be one later when you can change things in your schedule. There’s no shame in this, but yearning to be a writer “someday” gets old after a while.
2. Grab those blocks of time outside working hours. But be realistic about how long you can keep that up and what the personal cost to you might be.
3. Rearrange your work schedule to block off writing time. You could keep the same number of meetings, if you can move them so there are big enough blocks of time between them.

There’s also another way to imagine that you can become a writer. Use AI to write faster. This is a terrible idea. You won’t get the practice you need to write better. You’ll produce lame prose. And what you do create, you won’t be able to copyright. It’s very tempting to imagine this shortcut is a solution. It’s actually a very well-paved road to not-being-a-writer, and one that’s very hard to come back from.

Getting those blocks of time is hard. Applying yourself to the hard work of writing during those precious hours takes dedication.

All good writers find a way to do this. Can you?