How to Find Inspiration for Your Novel When You’re Always on the Go

Your days are spent serving others, and there’s never any time to work on your novel.

6:30 AM – Morning chaos.
You wake up early, hoping for a moment of quiet. Instead, you’re packing lunches, waking the kids, answering a Slack message, and trying to remember where the soccer cleats are. You think about writing…but the day’s already pulling you in five directions.

8:00 AM – Drop-offs & dings.
You’re in the carpool lane when your phone buzzes—another meeting added to your calendar. You get a spark of a novel idea and type it into your notes app… then forget to save it.

9:00 AM – Zooms & emails.
You’re in back-to-back calls, your inbox is overflowing, and lunch is whatever you can grab between meetings. You tell yourself you’ll write later—maybe after bedtime—but you’re already drained.

3:00 PM – The afternoon juggle.
You shift from work mode to mom mode: pickups, activities, snack duty, helping with homework from the driver’s seat. You answer emails from your phone and try to remember what day it is.

6:00 PM – Dinner & family time.
You’re cooking, cleaning, and juggling conversations while trying to finish one more work thing. Your mind is racing, and writing feels impossibly far away.

9:00 PM – The quiet that’s not so quiet.
The house is finally still. You sit down, open your laptop, and stare at the screen. Nothing comes out. You want to write—you mean to write—but you're completely spent. You tell yourself, “Maybe tomorrow.”

And yet, that never happens. Tomorrow comes around like every other day, and your writing dreams keep falling to the wayside. 

Being a working mom with a busy day job and active family doesn’t mean you can’t make time for your writing. In fact, there are ways to find inspiration for your novel when you’re out and about and on the go. 

Believe that there is inspiration all around you. 

Your life might seem mundane to you, but all novels are about a normal person being jolted out of their ordinary life into something extraordinary. 

Even fantasy, magic, vampires, space travel, whatever—it all starts normal, and then becomes something amazing over the course of the book. Plus, readers resonate with emotional experiences, even if it’s about something simple—think about the meet-cute that can happen while standing in line at the grocery store, or the Chosen One receiving a message that they must save the world while waiting at soccer practice. Think of all the moms who would love to read about a version of themselves who gets transported into a fantastical world. 

Your routine might be the same every day, but how can you start viewing your life with curious eyes? How can you find the beauty or the interesting in something that’s totally normal to you? 

Also, can you change things up to naturally bring something interesting into play? Take a new route, strike up a conversation with someone new, do something you wouldn’t normally do, and see where it takes you. 

When inspiration strikes, write it down. 

Sometimes we’ll get a flash of an interesting idea when we’re waiting in the doctor’s office, or in line at school pick-up, but since we aren’t in front of our computer, we file it away for later. But actually, that’s just likely to result in you completely forgetting the idea. When inspiration strikes, don’t let it float away. 

Keep track of ideas in the Notes app on your phone. Even if it’s pure gibberish, if it caught your attention, then it’s worth writing down. Maybe it won’t go anywhere, but the more you nourish your creative ideas and give them space to breathe, then more will come your way. You don’t have to drop everything when inspiration hits, but you can make sure you aren’t relying on your memory to keep track of everything (when has that ever worked out for us?). 

View your writing as something you get to do, rather than another obligation. 

It’s easy for writing to seem like just another thing on our to-do list, and it’s even easier for it to fall off the list altogether. But when you can remember your why for writing in the first place, you’ll bring more joy into the process and view it as something positive, rather than just an obligation. 

When you view it in a more positive light, you’ll be excited about returning to it, and you’ll be eager to find inspiration throughout your day, knowing that you’ll have limited time to write later. 

Also think about the impact that your writing can have on your family. Going after your passions not only helps you show up as a better mom (filling your cup first means you can fill others, too), but you’ll also model for your kids what it looks like to chase their dreams. And maybe one day your book can earn an income that can benefit your family financially, too. 

Writing your novel doesn’t require hours of uninterrupted time—it takes a willingness to find inspiration wherever it shows up.

When my 1:1 clients start having regular sessions with me, they notice how easy it becomes for them to find inspiration throughout their day, because they start spending regular time thinking about and working on their novel. Their days aren’t just passing by any longer, only doing things for others—they’ve instead made a conscious decision to carve out time for their passions, and the rest of their life benefits from it.

If you’re ready to make time for the things that really matter to you and finally finish the novel of your dreams, book a consult call with me to get a 3 part plan for how I’ll help you write a novel you’ll love.