Tiny magic
When you have no time to write
Gooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you happen to be!
Having decided to dedicate Q1 of 2026 to mostly creative projects, I’m delighted to report that, over the past three months, I’ve been able to make lots of progress on projects big and small. It’s been especially satisfying to leap ahead in my biggest project, which has been on the go for more than a year now. But the fact is that having this much time to write is a luxury, one we often don’t have.
I spoke with my mom a couple of days ago. She still works, but when she’s not working she’s writing—poems, memoir material, short stories, you name it. Only lately, she just hasn’t been able to find the time or energy to write. There’s just been far too much to do! And I could hear in her voice that she was missing her creative work deeply.
Sound familiar?
I was definitely in that position a year ago, when I was pushing to complete a major funding application and major book revisions, in addition to a lot of other work. I made a conscious decision to focus on that work rather than on my comedy writing or my other creative work. But I missed that work so much!
Since I had no time to work on, well, anything that wasn’t directly related to those two major projects, I decided to look for smaller ways to feed my soul with creative work. (I cringe to put it in those terms, but the fact is that during the time I was setting creative work aside I felt genuinely under-nourished, soul-wise.) And by ‘smaller’, I mean tiny.
I carried on with noting down ideas for short humour pieces I might tackle in the future. But that was work I usually only did when ideas came to me out of the blue. To make sure I got a regular dose of intentional creative work, I started playing around with one-liners.
Initially, I set myself a goal of writing and posting 1 one-liner per day for about a month. By Day 3, I could feel my brain responding to even this tiny little bit of creative work. I was playing around with writing and rewriting on a microscopic scale, compared to what I was doing for work, but I was playing. It was fun to post jokes and reactions unfold over the course of the day.
Ultimately, Work and Life made it impossible to keep up that pace of creative play. But I made sure to play around with one-liners regularly. Not only did it reassure me that my comedy muscles weren’t completely atrophied, but it gave me just enough creative nourishment to focus on my work-related writing without getting resentful or burnt-out.
If you’re someone who’s struggling to find time for creative writing at the moment, here are a few ideas for how to squeeze in tiny magic:
Play around with writing one-liners and posting them to social media.
Try out short-form poetry! Haiku, anybody?
Give microfiction a shot (at one point I was playing around with writing 6-word adaptations of classic books).
Freewrite for 5 minutes.
Read/watch/listen to an interview with a favourite author.
If you haven’t already, start keeping a notebook where you can jot down quick ideas that come to you in the middle of the day.
Got any other ideas for how to pursue creative writing when you just don’t have the time for it? Share them in the comments below!
As ever, thanks for reading. This is a reader-supported publication, and the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber (either at $6 per month or $60 per year. Paid subscribers can access everything on the site, from the archives to the ‘Things That Worked’ sample materials. They also benefit from weekly writing check-ins and other occasional bonuses!
If you’re really feeling generous, and you’d like access to everything above and regular feedback on your own writing whenever you need it, you can become a Founding Member ($150).
VB,
M