• Really, really write about the world you know.
Books on writing always urge that you write about what you know. That said, there are plenty of examples of fabulous books by authors who didn't start off knowing a subject but did a ton of research.

But if you've got a job or kids, you don't have the time to study dinosaur DNA or the cult of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Finding a story in the world you inhabit will make it so much easier to reach the finish line.

I always wanted to write about a female private eye. But because I had no time to explore that realm, I set my books in the world of magazines and made my character a crime writer and amateur sleuth.

I still have to interview cops and forensics experts—I do that on my lunch hour—but I don't have to spend any time investigating how a magazine works. Plus, I overhear great lines right at Cosmo and stick many of them right into my books.

And what if your world seems a bit dull to you? Just make it more fascinating when you write. Populate it with riveting or terrifying characters that compensate for any dullness of environment.

• Make a list of all the things you can unload from your life that will leave you more time for writing.
There are some things I absolutely can't do because I've chosen to have a full time job and write books, too. I don't do any crafts. I practically never shop. Oh, I stop off at stores and grab clothes in this kind of blitzkrieg way, but I never spend a Saturday poking around little boutiques and topping the experience off with a double latte at Starbucks.

There are some things I wish I didn't have to sacrifice, but others I don't mind having given up. I hired a college student to help me deal with many little jobs—like ordering books on line and planning family vacations—and that's been a godsend.

My greatest unloading strategy involves exercise. I don't like to exercise, but I want to look and feel good. I read this book called Power of 10 that suggests that if you do it the right way, you only have to work out once a week for under an hour. I feel in really good shape from following the guidelines in the book, and even if I stopped writing, I'd never give up this approach.

• Decide on your writing time and make it sacred, even if you don't use all of it.
Some people may be great at grabbing moments to write at odd times here and there, but I'm not one of them. If I were to wing it and wait for the right moment to summon me, I'd only be up to about page 16 on my first mystery.

There's got to be a certain inviolable period each day for me to write. In picking your time, it helps if you figure out when you are most likely to get into "the zone," that period during which ideas and words just seem to flow.

I've always been a night owl, but oddly I've found that writing fiction comes easiest to me in the mornings. I also need absolute quiet and a big flat surface—though not everyone is so particular. I've heard Scott Turrow say that he wrote his first book, Presumed Innocent, on the commuter train each day.

• Learn how to slice the salami.
Does this scenario sound familiar? The weekend approaches and the forecast is for rain. You tell yourself, "Perfect, I'm going to use all day Saturday to write. I'll get my whole first chapter done."

Saturday dawns and you mean to settle down at your desk but the idea of writing all day starts to seem overwhelming. You putter around a bit, pour a second cup of coffee, scrub the grime off the stovetop, watch the rain, skim the paper, field two phone calls, telling yourself all the while that you will find your way to your computer eventually. But it never happens. Years ago a time management expert named Edwin Bliss told me that the biggest mistake we make with a big project is to make it too daunting. He says the key is to break big projects down into manageable segments. It's a little big like cutting a big old ugly hunk of salami into appetizing slices. That's what you need to do with your writing time or else you will avoid it like the plague. I used Bliss' brilliant little strategy to trick myself into writing each day. For the first six months I told myself I was only going to write for 15 minutes a day. Fifteen minutes was my personal salami slice, and it was never hard to manage.

Over time, it became easier so I extended the fifteen minutes to thirty and then sixty and then to about two and half hours on each day of the weekend. Sometimes I write even longer than that but I never plan on more. On weekdays I aim for an hour.

There's something else that I found is helpful if your time is limited. Set a goal of pages to accomplish during your writing block. It pushes you to that amount. And if they aren't great, you can edit them later.

• Plot Your Books While You Are Standing in Line or driving or cooking or waiting for the bread to pop out of the toaster.
If you have a full-time job or you're a stay-at-home mom, you don't have lots of desk time but you don't have to be plopped in front of your computer in order to plan out your chapters, create characters, untie the knots in your plot, etc. Use odd bits of time to do the non-writing parts of writing.

I've found the shower to be a fabulous place to work on dialogue. I do it out loud—though I hope my next door neighbors, whose bathroom wall abuts ours, aren't too alarmed when they hear me shout things like: "You killed her, you bastard, didn't you?"

• Let ideas flow from the outside in.
Though I find writing tough at times, one part of the process that I absolutely love is sitting in my little home office with a notebook, getting inside my head and thinking of ideas for my books. But I don't have the luxury of doing that very often because I have to use my writing time each day to actually write. Thus I end up doing much of my idea generating when I'm out.

But here's the amazing thing about that little sacrifice. I've come to see how many fabulous ideas come from the outside in, when I'm traveling or driving through Central Park or sitting in a restaurant.

Over Her Dead Body, my brand new book and the fourth in the Bailey Weggins series, is about the world of celebrity journalism and I got the idea while standing at a fashion show, watching someone devour one of those magazines. There's one trick I learned that facilitates it. You have to think about what you need creatively and form it into a question.

For instance, "Where does the killer hide the weapon?" Trust me, you will be standing at an airline counter one day and someone next to you will say the weirdest thing that offers the answer to you right there.

• Write every day, even for just five minutes.
This will be tough, because you've got that damn job of yours, or those kids needing rides to soccer practice, but if you force yourself to write every single day, even for just a little bit, it makes it so much easier to do it the next day.

Good luck!!!

Kate White is the author of If Looks Could Kill, A Body to Die For, 'Til Death Do Us Part and Over Her Dead Body.