If You Want To Be A Writer, Become A Follower
Mastery takes daily practice.
I have a spiel for new writers. I’ve been saying it for so long, now I even bore myself. But if you want to be a writer, and eventually write well, you have to sit down and write. Every. Damn. Day.
I can hear the naysayers naysaying and throwing the book at me, the one with words like inspiration (as in you have to have it), time (as in no time), and many other excuses for not developing a daily writing practice.
As if you can become good at something by wishing it so.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the famous opera singer, or maybe it was a pianist, or a Hall of Fame baseball player. It doesn’t matter. He/she said, if I miss a day of practice, I know it. If I miss two days, my coach knows it. If I miss three days, the audience knows it.
Just so you know, I didn’t invent my mantra about writing every day. Nor did the guy who wrote about the 10,000 hours routine.
I discovered mine the hard way, by trying everything else that didn’t work.
Even the first cave painters knew that if you wanted to get good at something, you had to work at it. I guarantee it.
But we’re not here to talk about cave painting, we’re here to talk about writing, and that’s something I know a little something about. How and why to do it. Every. Damn. Day.
First, my credentials.
If you’re the kind of person who wants to know if I walk the walk and write the words, I get it. Feel free to check out my books on Kindle where I published 55 titles after open-heart surgery at age 72––many of them under pen names. Or Medium, where I wrote almost daily until my long lockdown drained my writing mojo.
Quantity is not the same as quality, though, and readers will have to judge the worth of my output because I’m not here to toot my horn about my chops as a writer.
To have any kind of output, though, you have to get words on the page. That’s what a daily writing practice will do for you. Give you consistent productivity. It will help you break through writing blocks and discover stories and forms you didn’t know were buried inside of you, waiting to break free.
And that’s just the beginning.
What you will find if you track me down is that once I started writing every day, I didn’t stop. I kicked my stop and start writing routine to the curb and wrote obsessively every morning, beginning with fifteen-minute sessions. And more than a quarter of a century later, I haven’t stopped.
I wrote before I entered the hospital for my nine surgeries. Except for heart surgery, I gave myself a break the day after an operation because I’d be loopy on drugs. Then I’d pick up my pen the next day and continue my process.
That included surgery on each of my hands to rebuild them after arthritis ruined my joints. I couldn’t always read my left-handed scrawl, but that wasn’t the point.
The only surgery that slowed me down for a bit was on my heart. But not for long.
Here’s what daily writing changed in my writing life.
My output.
I have boxes and drawers full of completed stories and novels now, whereas before, I had only drawers full of the beginnings of stories. Daily writing helped me finish my projects.
My relationship to my writing.
In my pre-disciplined writing life, I would hit a wall when I ran out of inspiration. When I couldn’t figure out what happened next in a story, I’d walk away for a day. Then it became two days. Two days would turn into a week, a month. In six months, when inspiration hit again, I’d have to work up the courage to look at the story again and find another germ of an idea and start over.
When I committed to daily writing, I was no longer at the mercy of inspiration. I learned that inspiration is like the wind; it comes and goes.
As a daily writer I couldn’t walk away just because it got hard. I had to stick with it until the timer went off, signaling I had to get ready for my day job. The next morning the same story waited for me whether I liked it or not.
A daily practice didn’t prevent me from getting stuck in a story. But now, with no out, no excuses like, “a real writer would know what comes next,” or “I need a break to figure out the next plot twist,” a break that might last indefinitely,” I’d have to come up with something, anything.
By staring at my screen and mulling over my story, maybe working on a different scene for a while, I’d eventually have a breakthrough.
In time, I realized that these so-called breakthroughs meant that by remaining connected to my work and not walking away when it got too hard, I was sealing my connection to my writing. I’d also carry a page of my work with me in my purse. Whenever I opened it to get my wallet or comb, it would remind me of my work, like an umbilical cord.
Somewhere along the way, I realized my discipline was set in stone, unusual for someone who didn’t consider herself a disciplined writer. I’d always been obsessive about finding the right word or phrase when I wrote, but that kind of persistence does not draw on the same muscles required for a writing discipline.
I used to joke that my only discipline was getting up in the morning, going to bed at night with some flossing in between. To me, discipline was a baseball bat with which you throttled yourself to get things done. Then, one day, I googled “discipline” and learned that, in fact, the word had roots in disciple, to follow.
Bingo. Yes. That resonated with me on a very deep level. I already knew that when I entered my practice every day, I was following my story, following my ideas, and also following my writing self unfolding before me.
My writing practice began to hold deeper meanings for me. In connecting to my writing every day, I no longer thought of discipline in the conventional way. I was following my process for insights about the story, about craft. My daily practice led me to breakthroughs about confidence, a wall every writer must climb.
Not that I was able to shed doubts and worries about my abilities, but by paying such close attention to my process, I was learning how to write through my insecurities. In the past, giving up so easily meant I missed important clues hidden in the struggle.
The more I wrote, the more committed I became to my daily practice. As I picked away at stories, I began to work at my craft. I discovered my trouble with writing short stories lay in the fact that I really wanted to write novels.
I’m not sure I would have found the confidence to take on big projects if I hadn’t found the way to write every day no matter what. Because that’s what it takes to finish a novel.
If you’re like me and you’ve staked out writing as the place where you feel most fulfilled, most challenged, most yourself, and you feel frustrated because you’re not doing it, then become a disciple of your writing. Write every day, even for a few minutes, and see where it takes you.
