How to Write a Book While Working Full Time: What Biagio Maffettone Learned Writing The First to Rise

Most people who say they want to write a book never start, and most of those who start never finish. The reason is rarely talent. It's time, and the kind of energy that's left over at the end of a working day. A job sets your hours. A book doesn't, so it waits until there's time left over, and usually there isn't.

Biagio Maffettone wrote The First to Rise while working full time. For more than two decades he has worked in residential mortgage lending in Westchester County, New York, and today he is Vice President of Sales at Meadowbrook Financial Mortgage Bankers Corp., where he still originates loans himself (NMLS #409994). Lending doesn't keep office hours. Rate locks expire, appraisals come in low, a closing moves up three days, and a buyer calls at 8 p.m. because the seller has a question. He fit the book around all of that.

What follows is how he did it, and the lessons from it that apply to anyone with a demanding job and a book they keep putting off.

Start with a reason that will survive a bad week

Motivation is a poor engine for a project that takes months. It shows up at the start and leaves by the third week, usually around the time the first draft stops feeling exciting and starts feeling like work.

Biagio's reason was concrete. After twenty years of sitting across the table from renters who wanted to own a home but felt, in his words, "stuck, confused, or intimidated," he wanted to give them something useful. As he wrote in Writing Didn't Heal Me. But It Taught Me Who I Am, "The intention was practical and clear." That matters more than it sounds. A reason tied to real people is harder to drop than a reason tied to an ambition. When the writing is going badly, "I want to be an author" is easy to postpone. "There are people I've met who need this" is not.

For anyone starting out, the useful test is simple. Can you name who the book is for in a sentence, and would you still write it if nobody else ever praised it? If the answer is yes, the reason is strong enough. If it's "I'll see," it's worth sharpening before you write a word.

Find your hour and protect it like a closing

Every working writer eventually makes the same discovery: the book gets written in a regular slot that belongs to it, not in spare time. Spare time gets eaten by everything else.

The slot can be small. It just has to be consistent and defended. People who finish books while working tend to pick one of three windows. Early morning, before email and phone calls begin, is the most common because nothing has gone wrong yet. Late evening suits people whose days end predictably. And some write in short blocks at lunch or on a commute, which works best for revising rather than drafting new material.

The mortgage business gave him a useful model for this. A closing date is fixed. Everyone on the deal works backward from it, and the things that threaten it get dealt with first. Treating writing time the same way, as a commitment that doesn't move unless something truly urgent happens, is what turns "I'll write when I can" into a finished draft. Cal Newport's book Deep Workmakes the broader case: focused time that you plan in advance produces far more than the scattered minutes you find during the day.

The other half of protecting the hour is being honest with the people around you. A spouse, a team or a business partner who knows what the time is for is far more likely to help guard it than one who sees you vanish without explanation. 

Plan the structure, then expect it to change

Writing a book without an outline is like starting a loan file without knowing the purchase price. You can do it, but you'll redo a lot of work.

Biagio started with an outline. That much is on the record, because the outline is where the book surprised him. "I assumed the writing would begin with numbers, planning, and systems," he wrote. "Instead, it began with memory." As he worked out the chapters, his own early uncertainty, the setbacks of his career and the clients he had helped kept coming up. The book he planned as a practical guide for renters became a more personal book about preparation, responsibility and long-term thinking, and why they matter.

There are two lessons there for anyone who works full time. First, an outline is what makes short writing sessions possible. If you sit down at 5:30 a.m. with forty-five minutes and no plan, you'll spend twenty of them deciding what to write. If the outline tells you that today is the section on the first year after a setback, you start writing straight away.

Second, the outline is a tool, not a contract. Books change shape as they're written. When a chapter keeps pulling in a different direction, that's often the book telling you what it's really about. The skill is noticing the difference between a better direction and a distraction, and the only way to tell is to write a few pages and look.

Write badly first, and write without an audience

The most common reason working professionals stall is that they edit while they draft. People who are good at their jobs are used to producing finished, correct work. A first draft is neither, and that feels uncomfortable to someone who spends the day getting details right on documents that have to be accurate. The writer Anne Lamott's advice in Bird by Bird is probably the most quoted on this point: let the first draft be bad, because nothing gets written if every sentence has to be good the first time. The draft exists to give you something to fix.

Biagio's version of this problem went deeper than polish. In The Biggest Challenge Biagio Maffettone Faced While Writing The First to Rise, he described the real fear plainly: "I wasn't afraid of writing badly. I was afraid of writing honestly—and not being heard." He was writing with no publishing deal and no readers waiting. That freedom cuts both ways. Nobody is pushing you, and nobody is telling you it's worth finishing.

What got him through was a change in the question he asked himself. He stopped worrying about whether readers would understand him and started asking only whether he was telling the truth. That gave him a standard he could judge every session against, without needing anyone else's approval.

Plan for the weeks you won't write

Every long project has dead weeks. A busy month at work, a family matter, an illness or simple resistance will stop the writing for a while. Most books that die, die here, because the writer treats a missed week as proof that the project has failed.

Biagio has been open about it. There were "weeks when Biagio didn't write at all," and he puts that down to fear and resistance, not laziness. What matters is that the gaps ended.

A few habits make the restart easier. End each session in the middle of a sentence or a thought, so you know exactly where to pick up. Keep a running note at the top of the manuscript with what you were working on and what comes next. And when you come back after a gap, don't reread the whole draft. Read the last few pages, then write. In mortgage terms, it's the difference between a file that stalls and a file that dies. A stalled file gets picked back up once the missing document arrives. A dead one gets abandoned. The writer who knows a gap is coming, and has a plan for the restart, keeps the file alive.

Use what your career already taught you

People with long careers often assume they're starting writing from zero. They aren't. Twenty years in any serious profession builds habits that transfer directly to a book.

For Biagio, several carried over. Mortgage lending means explaining complicated things in plain language to people who are anxious about them, which is most of what good nonfiction does. It means working on long processes with many steps where the end result depends on not dropping any of them. And it means reading people: understanding what someone is actually worried about when they ask a question. That last skill is what he has described elsewhere as putting the customer's needs first, and it is also what makes a reader feel a book was written for them.

The same is true in other professions. A nurse knows how to stay calm and specific under pressure. A teacher knows how to build an idea step by step. A salesperson knows how to hold attention. Treating your career as source material, not as the thing keeping you from writing, changes how the project feels.

It also gives the book its authority. A book on homeownership by someone who has guided buyers through it for twenty years carries a weight that a researched book can't fake. Readers can tell when the details come from experience.

Edit in passes, and get outside readers

Editing goes better when it's done in separate passes, each with one job. The first pass is structure: does each chapter earn its place, and is it in the right order? The second is clarity: does every paragraph say what it means? Only the last pass is about sentences, word choice and typos. Mixing these up is how people end up polishing paragraphs they later delete.

Outside readers are essential, and the best ones are not the people who love you most. A useful early reader is someone close to the intended audience who will tell you where they got bored or lost. For a book written partly for renters thinking about buying a home, that might be exactly that kind of reader. A professional editor, if the budget allows, catches what friends won't. The Authors Guild and similar organizations publish guidance on finding and working with editors and on standard industry practice.

Getting it out into the world

A working professional today has more than one route to publishing. Traditional publishing means finding an agent, who pitches the book to publishers. It can bring wider bookstore distribution and an advance, but it usually takes a long time and the author gives up some control. Self-publishing, most commonly through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, puts the author in charge of the schedule, the cover, the price and the rights, and leaves them responsible for editing, design and marketing too. Hybrid presses sit somewhere in between.

None of these is the right answer for everyone. The choice depends on how much time you have, how much control you want, and who you're trying to reach.

The First to Rise is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.  Two practical steps apply to any route. An ISBN is the number bookstores and libraries use to identify an editio . Anyone writing while employed should also read their employer's policy on outside activities before publishing, particularly in a regulated field.

What finishing actually gave him

Biagio didn't start the book looking for personal insight, and he has said that writing didn't fix anything on its own. What it did was slow him down enough to see why the work he does every day matters to him. The practical book about preparation and responsibility turned out to be a book about the habits that had shaped his own career.

For anyone holding a full-time job and an unwritten book, the lesson from his experience is less about inspiration than about logistics. Know who it's for. Give it a fixed slot. Work from an outline and let it change. Let the first draft be rough. Expect the dead weeks and plan the restart. And use the career you already have as the book's foundation, not its obstacle.

Most people never finish because they wait for a clear stretch of time that never comes. Writers who finish mostly don't get that stretch either. They write in the hours they already have.

Frequently asked questions

Can you really write a book while working full time? Yes. Many published authors wrote their first books while holding full-time jobs. What makes it possible is a consistent writing slot, even a short one, and an outline that lets each session start without delay. Waiting for a free month rarely works.

How long does it take to write a book while working full time? It varies widely with the book's length, the time available each week and how much revision it needs. A few focused hours a week, kept up consistently, will add up to a full draft over a period of months, and editing and publishing take additional time after that.

How many hours a week do you need to write a book? Consistency matters more than the total. A few hours a week, at the same times every week, usually produces more than one long session whenever the calendar allows, because you don't lose momentum between sessions.

What did Biagio Maffettone write about in The First to Rise? The First to Rise: A Journey of Resilience, Reinvention, and Redemption began as a practical book for renters who felt stuck or intimidated by homeownership and became a more personal book about preparation, responsibility, resilience and long-term thinking, drawn from his life and his 20-plus years in mortgage lending.

Where can I buy The First to Rise? It is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions. You can read more about the book, including a sample, on the book page.

About the author

Biagio Maffettone is a licensed Mortgage Loan Originator (NMLS #409994) and Vice President of Sales at Meadowbrook Financial Mortgage Bankers Corp., with more than 20 years of experience helping buyers and homeowners in Westchester County, New York. He is the author of The First to Rise and writes about leadership, mentoring and the habits behind a lasting career, including what new loan officers need to learn. For mortgage guidance, visit biagiomaffettone.com.

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