It doesn't help that my daily schedule is a nightmare of ill fitting priorities.  The typical day starts at 6:30 AM.  This is followed by two hours of getting the kids up, fed and off to school.  Midway through this my wife leaves for work.  Then it's clean up time, followed by going back to bed for 2-3 hours.  Then it's back up to get myself ready for work.  I put in a 10-11 hour shift, come home and get a couple hours on the computer to myself before heading back to bed around 3 AM.  Rinse, lather, repeat.  Days off are naturally better but they are in the minority.  Writing is fairly time consuming and free time is a luxury I just don't have.

I've tried technological solutions to this problem.  The first was getting a PDA.  That was a few years ago and it just wasn't working for me.  The good part was anything I wrote on it was stored digitally and could be quickly dumped on to my computer.  The bad part was the tiny form made writing on it very slow.  My ideas would come out way faster than I could type or write them into that thing.  The end result is that I would get frustrated and give up before getting very far.  After giving up on that idea I went to the low tech approach of carrying a small notebook everywhere.  This was nice because it meant that every time an idea hit me I could write it down quickly and easily.  On the other hand I kept losing notebooks and often forgot to type those notes into the computer, which is close to the same thing.

Recently I've bought a netbook with the same idea in mind.  It's small enough to carry around easily and everything I write is stored digitally.  So far this is working pretty well.

All of this is just a way of collecting my thoughts.  They hit me randomly through out the day so without a system to try and remember them, I'm losing a lot of material.  None of this addresses the actual process of writing.  The real killer is procrastination.  There is nothing I wouldn't rather be doing more than writing most of the time.  Which is not to say that I hate writing.  I love it.  But the discipline to do it regularly and well is my weakness.  

When I sit down at the computer I'm immediately faced with the great time killer, the internet.  At this very moment I'm writing something for the internet rather than writing something for one of my scripts.  And this I actually consider productive.  Most of my time on the internet is spent reading something on one of my endless interests.  Sure, I could call this research, but that's almost always a lie.  I always have one productive week every year where I reel off dozens of pages.  That's when I'm on vacation at a house with no TV or internet.

Having the will power to turn away the distractions is the hardest part of writing.  In some areas, I do quite well.  I've completely given up gaming.  TV watching I've cut down pretty dramatically.  I only follow a small number of shows regularly, so just a few hours a week goes in that direction.  The internet is the killer though.  This netbook actually makes that worse as now I have wifi capability and can get online at work or the laundromat.

What I've been trying to do lately is to treat it like a job.  I want to make money at this so I have to act like it is a paid job, even if the paying part doesn't happen until much later.  So I have a schedule.  Every day I have to sit down and write for a set period of time.  On most days, with my schedule, that's only an hour or two.  But the point is to get that hour in all the time.

One of the worst stumbling blocks is writing when I don't have a clear objective.  Sometimes I'll write nothing rather than write something crappy.  Part of setting a schedule is killing that tendency.  If I have to spend that hour writing, I won't worry as much about the quality.  If it sucks I'll just write something different the next day and delete the crap.  Yes that means some time was wasted but if you figure that any time spent writing is at its worst practice writing, then you haven't really wasted any time.

That word practice is really the heart of the story.  Writing regularly, whether it be for practice or not, makes you a better writer.  During the period when I was writing as a dedicated movie critic for this site is when I wrote my best reviews.  Very simply, I wrote about movies constantly and that made my work sharp.  These days I write far fewer reviews and the process of writing one is not as smooth as it used to be.  I'm just not as locked in to the process anymore.

So there's my advice if you want to be a writer.  Do it regularly.  Write all the time.  Or at least all the time you can spare.  It is the simplest way to be better at it and avoid all the pitfalls that come with the process.  Having said that I can consider this post practice and call my time productive, even if my script didn't get any further along.