The first time I tried to write a novel I was 23. I had all the time in the world. I was a full-time graduate student. I lived alone, I had no children, and it took me three years to finish a draft.

Five years later, I tried again. I was working full-time as a reporter and I lived with my boyfriend, but we had no kids. This time, it took me five years.

All that time, my technique, if you could call it that, was the same: set up my laptop at a coffee shop or a library or at my desk at home, and “write.” But, as New York Times best-selling author Meghan O’Rourke recently tweeted: “It’s really important to have at least three hours to write every day so you can spend the first two hours squirming and checking the internet and daydreaming before getting down to it.”

Touché. I thought I needed hours with nothing to do but write. But even with all those hours, I didn’t produce much. So I started applying for retreats and residencies, thinking maybe I needed long stretches—days, weeks—to do nothing but write.

I wrote three novels that way. Fits of progress followed by long lulls of nothing. And then I had a child.

Suddenly, there were no long stretches.

I struggled. I had to figure out a way to fold my writing back into my life, but my life had changed so dramatically I wasn’t sure how. I turned in my fourth novel two years past the deadline. I had an idea for another, but no idea how I’d actually get it gone.

And then, my friend, author Laura McHugh, told me she’d started doing “writing sprints.” I don’t have all day, she told me, but I can commit to one hour.

Frankly, an hour felt impossible, but I liked the idea of a sprint. I turned off my Wi-Fi, silenced my ringer, put on some noise-canceling headphones, and for 15 minutes, I wrote. I didn’t produce a lot, but it was more than I’d done the day before. More than I’d done in a month. I did the same thing the next day, and the next. And less than two years later, I had a solid draft.

Words add up

There is nothing magic about 15 minutes—and yet there is. We all waste 15 minutes every day scrolling on our phones. Probably more, but definitely 15. And in 15 minutes, if you can write 100 words, you can have a full-length draft of a novel in two years. (One hundred words times 365 days times two years is 73,000 words, which most editors will tell you is on the shorter end of average novel length.) You’ll also probably start enjoying those 15 minutes; what you accomplished will help carry you through the day. And sometimes those 15 minutes will turn into longer sessions.

Will what you write be ready to publish? No. First drafts never are. Part of the 15 minute technique is to give yourself permission to write badly. You’ll fix it later. But here’s the key: There is no published novel without a finished first draft. What if two years ago you’d decided to write 15 minutes a day? You’d have hundreds of pages to polish into something publishable.

Training your brain

But more than the words on the page—which add up!—the genius of the 15 daily minutes is that the real secret to writing a novel, or achieving any long-term artistic goal, is time spent thinking about the thing you’re creating. You can’t write a novel without hours and hours spent considering the world you’re building, the people you’re creating, the problems they’ll encounter, and the route it will take for them to get to the end of their journey.

To do all that, you need to spend a lot of time walking around with the novel in your brain. Spending even just 15 minutes each day “with” your novel means that it will always be present in your mind. Nurture that presence when you aren’t writing. Cut down on podcasts when you’re walking or driving. Give yourself quiet. Tell yourself: I’m going to think about the next scene I need to write while I go through this car wash, or walk to the grocery store, or wait for my son’s lacrosse practice to end. 

Keep a notebook with you to jot down plot ideas and snippets of dialogue. Or, use your phone to dictate messages to yourself, though your phone can be very dangerous as a distraction, so beware. 

How to find your 15 minutes

It’ll be different for everyone. You can’t get me out of bed one minute before I need to be awake, so mornings are out for me. And once I’ve put my son to bed, I’m pretty wiped. It’s certainly not my most creative time. So I do my 15 minutes in the middle of the day. 

I coach novelists who do their 15 minutes after their morning workout, or after they’ve dropped their kids off from school, or right before bed. I know writers who write at work on their lunch break. All that matters is the time; the where and when can change as your life does.

Give yourself permission

Let me tell you a secret: Most writers—even those with books in your favorite bookstore, reviewed by the big papers—don’t make enough money off their writing to pay all their bills. The same is true of all other artists: musicians, painters, actors, dancers. Does that make their work less legitimate? If you write, you’re a writer. Own it.

Another thing to remember is that every novel you pick up (and every song you listen to, every performance you attend) started as somebody’s wild idea. It exists only because its creator decided to spend unpaid time working on it. Little by little, the wild idea turns into something real.