On Writing Every Day

I know I've written about this subject before, but an experience last week has inspired me to write about it again. It's about that mantra I'm sure you've heard plenty of times: write every day. Write even when you don't want to write. Even when the words are awful.

I'll be the first to admit that I fail at this. Which is why I like to think of it more as: actively think about what you're writing every day, even if you don't write any words. My writing time is more productive when the plot and the characters have been on my mind when I'm not writing.

But I'm at the very beginning stages of a first draft, and I have a harder time working on a story at the beginning than at the middle. The vastness of pages I have to fill to have a completed manuscript looms for me, and, since I'm a pantser, so does the idea that I don't really know what is going to fill them. It takes 10,000 words or so for me to believe that what I'm working on is enough of an idea for a whole manuscript.

So at the beginning, writing every day is harder for me than when I'm really deep in the manuscript. And the other night I was trying to write and it just. wasn't. working.

I think I wrote about 200 words, and I had to force out each one. It wasn't as many as I was aiming for, but I told myself that at least I wrote something, and then I worked on something else. But when I was showering a couple of hours later, about to go to bed, a sentence and scene appeared in my mind. I got out of the shower, sat down at my computer, and wrote over 700 words in very little time.

I fully believe that I wouldn't have had the idea that sparked those words if I hadn't forced out the 200 awful ones earlier that night.

So yeah, sometimes we can't write every day. That doesn't mean you're any less of a writer, or that you'll never be successful, or that you don't love writing. But just trying to write every day has endless benefits. In my opinion, that's worth remembering.