If you DO feel a burning desire to commit to writing, set aside sacred time each day for exactly that purpose. I get up in the early morning and write for a couple of hours. I recently let my cousin's son move in, and now my morning hours are ebbing away by having someone else in the house who wants to chat and doesn't see the invisible barrier I'm trying to erect around my computer desk. So I may have to choose to get up an hour earlier each day. But each day, it's a choice.

2. Forget the novel for now. At least until you have more time, or more gumption.

3. Forgot about getting published. You sound like a new writer. Chances are you won't get your first novel published, or your second. Chance are you won't get your first story published, or your second. Or your tenth.

4. Don't even worry about writing every day. Five days a week is just fine. But no less than five. Keep a diary to keep you honest.

In other words, don't worry about anything except becoming a writer--someone who writes on a regular basis. If it comes down to it, don't even worry about writing real stories. Just write scenes and episodes.

If you can't find time for this, then maybe you're not a writer. This isn't a bad thing. I could never have been an athlete, as much as I dreamed about becoming one, because I didn't have the dedication needed to do it.

PS -- I wake up at 5 in the morning to write. If I didn't do it then, I'd never do it. And I HATE waking up in the morning. But I hate not writing more.

There's no reason why working 1/2 hour six days a week is inherently superior to working 3 hours on a Saturday; it all depends on how your mind works.

But the bottom line is you have to put in the butt in chair time. There are a gazillion ways to get yourself to do that; you're just going to have to try them all and find some that work.

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2. Forget the novel for now. At least until you have more time, or more gumption.

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Welcome to Hatrack, Garp. Although I had to look up "gumtion" in the dictionary, this is something I have seriously been considering.

In the last three months I have managed to get about 20,000 words into this story. While that's quite a bit of progress, it would still take me the better part of a year to finish the book at that rate.

On the one hand I'm thinking about setting this story aside and working on smaller ones until I have more time for writing, so that at least I'll have some finished stories instead of one big unfinished one.

On the other hand, I don't want to spend the rest of my life writing short stories, and everyone seems to agree that the best way to learn how to write a novel is to write a novel. That makes me want to just stick with it until I get this one done.

If you stop writing your novel, I guarantee it won't get written. If you want to write a novel, write a novel. If you want to write short stories, write short stories.

If you get hung up on the "best" way to do it you'll never get anything done. Just do something and trust that you'll figure it out as you go.

1. There are two schools of thought. One says to start with short fiction, then move on to long fiction. The other says that the forms are too different from one another, and that the only way to learn to write in one form (the novel, in your case) is by writing it. Having written both, there is something to be said about this. OSC wrote a great essay several years ago about his expereince of transfering from short story writer to novelist, and it seems that he sides with the second group--you learn to write novels by writing novels. It's in one of the Writer's Digest books on novel writing. Maybe your local library will have it. Alas, this doesn't help much. Which leads us to number two.

2. What do you prefer to read, short fiction or long fiction? And, what kind of stories make the most sense to you, short or long fiction? For me, I enjoy the novel 100x more than the short story. That's a clue.

3. Finally, you have to realizes that there are sensibilities--something I learned from a private e-mail exchange with James N. Frey, who wrote the two DAMN GOOD NOVELS books. Very few authors are competent with both forms. Hemingway was one. Stephen King, Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card are some others. But most writers are good at only one. Ray Bradbury has written two or three good novels, but his genius is in short fiction. So is Harlan Ellison's. Tad Williams, Robert Jordan, John Irving--they're are novelists. This doesn't mean you can't learn how to write short fiction (or long); it only shows you how your creative mind works.

I have a gut feeling that you want to write novels, but are afraid of the commitment. Understandable. If I'm right, then write novels.

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In the last three months I have managed to get about 20,000 words into this story. While that's quite a bit of progress, it would still take me the better part of a year to finish the book at that rate.

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Look at it this way. After the next twelve months are over, it will still be a year later. It can be a year later with no book written, or it can be a year later with a manuscript completed. But it will STILL be a year later.

Putting off writing because of how long it will take you to complete your manuscript is simply one of the many ways procrastination derails us from our dreams. You'd be surprised at how often we let procrastination mask our fears.

You can learn a lot from writing short stories. You don't have the margin of error that you do in a novel. You need to get it right. You also need to be efficient with your storytelling, a skill that I think a lot of novelists could benefit from. You need many of the same skills that you need to write novels: character and dialog and plot and description and world-building and so on. If you spend time writing shorts you will learn a lot of skills that you can put to use in novel-writing; it will not be wasted time.

The other thing about shorts is that they're, well, short. So you can write a bunch of 'em, and try new things, and practice techniques, and learn what works and what doesn't work - wheras if you commit to a novel you're pretty much working within one style and one framework. You'll learn a lot about how to write that particular novel, and you'll learn some things about writing ficion in general - but you might learn more from a year of intensive short story writing. And you might realize you really like shorts.

But if you don't like short stories and don't want to write them - well, there is no point in forcing yourself. Write what you want. Figure it out as you go along.

You can learn the craft writing novels, but it's harder to get the kind of feedback you need to successfully learn what you're doing. And it's harder to learn from the feedback you do get, mostly you'll want to curl up and die or spend time figuring out a way to make your critics do it in your place. Certainly, it will be hard to keep on writing your novel if you're getting feedback about the basics of the craft while you're trying to write it.

Still, write down what you have. Don't worry about making it publishable until you've got a few short stories or something similar under your belt, but do record the ideas. And keep doing that. Write everything down, or at least as much of it as possible (I'm so bad about this, but in the past I've been quite good about it, even if I've managed to lose most of the material I'd written down). You'll thank yourself for it later, when you're ready to write the story you want people to read.

But the craft of writing and the original ideas for your stories...work on one at a time.