The day Clive Cussler crossed my path was my lucky day.  Not that Clive Cussler has any idea that he influenced a young writer some thirty years ago, but he did.  I had three small children then, and life was a bumpy roller-coaster ride. Still I dreamed of quiet time in which to write, even though the writing thing wasn't happening.

Then I attended a wonderful writers conference in Denver and among the speakers was Clive Cussler, a local writer with two or three adventure-packed suspense novels already published.  He filled the ballroom, and I never forgot what he said.  He said he had no time to write, so he had made the time by getting up before dawn and writing several hours before going to a full-time job in an advertising agency.  Every morning.  For years. "How badly do you want to write?" he said.

Which set me to thinking:  If Clive Cussler, with a family and full-time job, could make time to write, what was my excuse?   I went home and started writing.  Twenty, thirty minutes a day, which gradually added up to my first published articles.

But Clive Cussler said something else.  Learn your craft.  I had thought writers were born with craft, like being born with blue eyes.  But, no, craft must be learned. He said that he had typed out a novel he admired, and in the laborious act of typing page after page, he came to see how to introduce and develop characters, make dialogue crackle like actual conversation, work in background and descriptions without stopping the action, build tension and suspense, and propel the action forward.

I would spend the next decade writing non-fiction books, but when I decided to write a mystery novel, I thought about how Clive Cussler had gone about learning his craft.  No, I did not type out a novel.  I do not have the patience.  But I took the time to analyze several mystery novels, re-reading them and looking closely at the way in which the different elements worked together.   Half way through this exercise, a light bulb went on in my head, and I began to see how to write a mystery novel.  I sat down and wrote The Eagle Catcher, the first in the Wind River series. This September, The Silent Spirit, my fifteenth novel, was published.

I probably would have figured out that to become a writer, I had to make the time to write, and to get published, I had to work at learning my craft.  But it happened that Clive Cussler told me so when I needed to hear it.  I still think of all those other would-be writers with shiny, hope-filled eyes who had crammed the ballroom where  he spoke and wonder how many took his advice to heart and set out on their own writing careers.

I know that I did.

How do you make the time to write?