The open book: what writers don’t tell writers about writing (part 7)

If there’s a million dollar writing question, it’s this (understanding of course, there are some 2 million dollar questions, usually on getting an agent/publication):

Should writers write every day?

Read ten writing books.

No, ask ten writers.

Take a poll on Twitter.

Doesn’t matter. You’ll get predictably conflicting answers to the question.

Predictably?

Absolutely.

Most of us have an understandable aversion to looking lazy in public (dang you, deeply embedded Puritan work ethic of the western world), so you’ll get a majority split favoring yes answers: yes, I do; yes, you should. It’s saintly to aim for, really. Aspirational. And sometimes, it’s also completely true.

But the truth is also No: no, I don’t; it’s not a huge deal if you don’t; sometimes no one can, and that’s completely normal.

It’s a messy, dialectical world up in our brains, and the yes and no are simultaneously true. There are great reasons and explanations for why this is.

The yes, write every day camp

Writing isn’t magic. There’s no mysticism to it. It’s something you either do, or you do not do.

There’s a lot built up around it, though; ideas about inspiration, the muse. Shit like this, perpetrated by writers ourselves:

On the night of 22 September 1912…composed ‘The Judgment’, a masterpiece of paternal ambivalence. In the dissociative, happy hours that followed, he noted in his diary that writing requires a ‘complete opening out of the body and the soul’. — Will Rees, Kafka the Hypochondriac

But the truth is that writing is concrete. The only way it gets done is if you show up and do it. And the deeper truth is that there is, verifiably, no difference between what anyone writes when they are “inspired,” “hot,” or, bless ya, Franz, have their body and soul “open.” I say verifiably because you can run an experiment to prove this is true: take a page of something you’ve written when you felt on, and a page of something that felt like a horrible grind — and hide them somewhere for, say, 2 weeks. Then, pull them out and look at them. Can you tell the difference?

I know you can’t.

Working every day, whether at the same time, getting up early, or fitting it between everything else is how writers are productive. Period. Suck the romance from it all, and it’s putting words on a page.

They aren’t always going to be great words, in the best order. But that’s what revision is for.

The no, you don’t hav’ta write every day side

There are three unassailable points that favor this side.

Firstly, life happens. Self-care is important. You can’t do and be everything in any one 24 hour period. Sometimes, other things take priority. Maybe it’s family, or health, or work. Other times, it’s laundry or binging the new season of something. Just like writers remind one another not to also be editors as we draft, don’t let shoulds and external ideals of importance dictate you doing you, at any time. Writing is just one part of who you are.

Secondly, and this is, honestly, my least favorite part of the writing life, is that: there’s business shit to do. Submitting, revising, schmoozing, marketing, reading, promoting…this all takes time.

And energy.

Therefore, sometimes, you can’t write every day because you also have to make time to help your writing get a foothold in the world. And, while you should never confuse doing all the things around writing as writing, it is necessary.

And lastly, our brains are, generally speaking, designed to follow a sequence of cognitive tasks in terms of creativity. Creative thinking doesn’t just happen (again, not magical). There’s a period of creative incubation, when our subconscious needs to chew through new input, problems we’ve posed to it, and this downtime is when memories are integrated and new connections are made. It takes time. Not a ton of time. But some time. It’s crucial to give ourselves this time, especially when we are trying to write something really emotional, something where we are integrating disparate bits of information, or — most commonly — drafting something new.

The answer is yes AND no

I’m not dodging the question, I promise. I think both answers are true and valid, at the same exact time.

Try hard to write every day. Even if it’s just a few words, even if they’re less than stellar. Making yourself show up every day in some manner or another helps develop the muscles you’ll need when you are, eventually, looking down the business end of a deadline, and you need to get it done. It also conditions you to take your writing seriously — not so seriously that you start sounding like Kafka or anything — but seriously enough that you will be able to push through the fact that this career is a lot of work with no guarantee of any sort of success.

But, on days when you can’t, or won’t, work: forgive yourself. Feeling guilt or shame isn’t going to make getting back to it any more appealing (that counter-intuitive human thing of continuing to duck that which we feel crappy about ducking is real). It is what it is. Downtime and rest is important. So is incubation. Do what you gotta, or do what you want to — so long as you do try again and show up again, soon.

I don’t write every day. I do something around writing most days, and write, at the very least, a few times a week. I’m not the most productive writer around, but I’m not the least, either. I wouldn’t say any part of the above gets easier the longer you’re at it, but it does get easier to feel when you slack your reins and when you ride hard.