Writing | Life Lessons

To Train the Writing Muscle

And push it hard as possible

When we look for advice from other writers, ideas they might share with us to apply to our own process, it is rare that any of them suggest something so resoundingly new that it leaves us stunned.

In fact, most of the advice is about the same things. A variation here, an opinion there, but the advice from those who have lived for writing is very similar.

And I want to believe that they are similar because we are human. Some things unite us because we are from the same species: little ways of activating one characteristic or another, ways of predisposing ourselves to do this or that. That is why the advice is or sounds the same.

However, and assuming as true that the advice is the same, why don’t we all apply it and be successful writers (and in other areas as well)? What sets us apart, and what makes us different from each other?

In fact, advice is just that: advice.

It is not an absolute truth or a dogma. It is something that, even if it has worked for the totality of people who have used it, does not guarantee that it will work for us.

And that is why, even though we see a lot of similarities in the advice we seek, we also see a lot of differences:

• writing in public, writing alone;
• writing every day at the same time or varying it for creativity purposes;
• structuring a story first or writing followed by editing afterward;

In short, a myriad of different pieces of advice.

All of them, however, seem to agree on one thing: there is some kind of a writing muscle. We don’t know if it is the brain or a specific part of it, we don’t know if it is in fact a muscle.

But we do know that it behaves as such.

Why?

Because it demands to be trained every day. We all have felt, at least once, that we have unlearned something (like writing) when we have spent a long time without practicing it. We feel perfectly inadequate at something that we have always performed so well, only to find that all it takes is a few minutes, a few repetitions, and we never seem to have forgotten anything.

And when we go back to training that muscle daily, it begins to amaze us. We are now able to write more words or write for more hours at a time. Ideas flow differently because we think more clearly. The muscle rises to a higher level, it begins to work almost independently, but is actually interconnected with us and our life.

And our writing is born.

But, as I have been saying around here, training is necessary every day. We may miss one or the other, but we should avoid it.

The tendency to repeat a day with nothing is enormous. Inertia has strong power.

So we must take care of our writing muscle. Feed it well (by reading), and push it hard as possible. Time is probably the only limitation we can’t overcome. The inexorable passage of the time. But we can win the battle against time if we take it and crush it to the maximum. It only depends on us.

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