Write Every Day... Or Don't!

I think it's helpful, until it's isn't.

I’ve been answering questions from our Fairest Writer Facebook group, which you should join if you want to be in touch more regularly. Here’s a wonderful one from Kulvinder Arora:

Writers often say, "write everyday." In what ways is this helpful to writers and is the advice sometimes not helpful.

Whenever I think about the idea of writing every day, the passage that haunts me is this one from Haruki Murakami's interview with The Paris Review.

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. 

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

I do find it true that it takes a lot of stamina to be a writer, and writing gets better the more regularly you do it. The casual writing I do for this newsletter is very different from the writing I prepare for books, which tries to maintain its vitality while also being carefully worked through and arranged. All that takes a lot of time and effort, which is part of why the advice exists to try writing every day.

At the same time, there are many people for whom that's unrealistic, and it's important a lot of times to just do our best. I caught a conversation with Susan Choi at AWP recently, where she made the great point that so much of how writers from the past were able to work so much was because they came from generational wealth that many of us don't have. I would add that many of these figures who devote all their time to writing--Nabokov, Wordsworth, and yes, Murakami--have and had wives who pick up the slack and do a ton of their work for them.

Like all things related to writing, every individual writer has a different journey when it comes to productivity, and different ways to work or not work better. And a writer would have different methods at different points in their lives and for the specific projects they're working on.

In my case, both my methods and life circumstances have shifted a lot during the course of my career. During times when I've had a full-time job, it's been important for me to maintain a schedule where I get at least a sliver of time every day to work on my personal projects, knowing how easy it would have been for me to give up on my personal goals in the pressure of my daily work. 

For me, it was less about explicitly writing every day, and more about keeping in touch with that project and not letting too much time go by without keeping tabs on it, because it's all too easy sometimes to let it go in the rush of other priorities. Over the years, I've gotten into the habit of being more conscious of when I take breaks from projects, and would set an alarm on my calendar to remind myself to check back in if I'm going to be gone for a little while.

My work on Fairest overlapped with having a full-time media job, so I was the type of person then who worked on a relatively structured schedule, writing at specific times every day and not taking a lot of long breaks. I also used a lot of hacks to keep myself writing, from Internet blockers to pomodoro timers to get myself motivated.

Over the years, my work habits have significantly relaxed, in part because I have more control of my time since I've left full-time media. A lot of that has to do with approaching productivity internally rather than externally, being more attuned to what motivates me as a writer an the amount of creative energy I have on a day-to-day basis.

One of the key insights I've gained over the years is the realization that the thing that makes me least productive is my anxiety over productivity. So as I've learned to let go of expectations for myself about what I'm "supposed" to be accomplishing, it's actually been a lot easier for me to just get on with writing instead of procrastinating.

Every day, I usually wake up asking myself if I feel like writing first thing in the morning. The answer varies from day to day, but when I don't feel like writing, I'm habituated to reading instead in the morning, which is my most creative and energized period, usually lasting from 7 to 11 a.m. I typically read if I don't feel like writing, and more often than not, just reading something I enjoy (or have issues about) jumpstarts my brain so I end up just organically shifting to writing at some point during the day. I also don't try to force myself to write if I end up not feeling like it, which happens especially when I'm particularly stressed or traveling or if my routine is disrupted, and that's also totally okay.

Even though I know they work for a lot of people, I generally try to eschew external markers like deadlines or word counts, just because I feel like they can run counter to the organic development of the manuscript and also sap my motivation. But I do enjoy having a specific deadline once I'm further along in revision, mainly because I enjoy the adrenaline rush of getting something across the finish line. 

So this long-winded missive ends up boiling down to the idea that writing every day is helpful because it keeps you in touch with a project, but it’s not helpful when the principle of writing every day overtakes the goal of nourishing your creativity. Taking breaks allows you to renew your strength, as long as you make sure to keep tabs on the project so it doesn’t end up getting too hard to return to.

Hope this helps and looking forward to next time,

Meredith