(Hi, folks! For the time being, some, most, or all of the fol­low­ing links will still revert back to the orig­i­nal Writ­ing About Writ­ing web­page over on Blog­ger. This is not a mis­take. It just takes a long time to move thou­sands of arti­cles. Thank you for your patience as we nav­i­gate this tran­si­tion.)

Question: Do You Really Have to Write Every Day to Be A Writer?

Short answer:

No, you have to write to be a writer. 

Long answer:

More than any oth­er process claim I make here at Writ­ing About Writ­ing, this one caus­es spon­ta­neous bow­el void­ing, and makes peo­ple grab their pitch­forks and torch­es and wan­der around the Bay Area killing peo­ple who look like they might be pre­ten­tious writ­ers in the hopes that one of them will be me.

The thing is, I have nev­er actu­al­ly said that writ­ing every day is nec­es­sary for some­one to be a writer. I don’t spend my time bequeath­ing that title on the wor­thy or deny­ing it of the unwor­thy. I have more inter­est­ing things to do with my pre­cious num­ber of finite breaths — like rearrange my sock draw­er.

You are a writer if you “Earn Your ER.”

Folks, I know this is a lit­tle TL;DR, but please lis­ten. Just this once. Just for shits and gig­gles. Just so you can put on your hip­ster glass­es and tell peo­ple you knew I was­n’t real­ly telling peo­ple they had to write every day “before it was cool.” Just pay atten­tion this one time.

Write. Don’t write. I don’t give a fuck. 

I want you to be ful­filled in life. I want you to get what you want out of the rat race. I want you to suc­ceed.

If you want to be a writer. I give a fuck only in so much as I give a fuck about all of you, and I want to help you make that dream come true. If you fan­ta­size so hard you wet your­self about BEING a writer, I have some pret­ty good advice for you about how to get there. Because that used to be me, dream­ing hard and sit­ting around not writ­ing — in love with the idea of being a writer.   

But if you don’t actu­al­ly want to write, don’t write. There’s no glam­our in this job. Very lit­tle fame. A pit­tance of for­tune. Writ­ers are not rock­stars. If we achieve ANY of those things, ever, it will only be after years and years of toil­ing away with­out them (and there are eas­i­er ways to achieve any of them). There is absolute­ly no rea­son to write oth­er than for the sheer love of writ­ing. 

You don’t need per­mis­sion not to write. You don’t need abso­lu­tion. You don’t need approval. You might need to get over this idea that you’re a writer, or more like­ly, you ARE a writer, but you might need to get over this idea that you’re going to ever do it as a day job. But that’s between you and you. You don’t need to make excus­es that no one believes any­way. All you need is to put down the pen and not write.

Writ­ing is not the kind of activ­i­ty you should be doing if you don’t actu­al­ly want to be doing it. If you want write “more than any­thing else in the whole wide world,” and you have these fan­tasies of get­ting rich and famous because you’re the next Stephen King or Danielle Steele, I promise (pinky swear) that it won’t hap­pen by sit­ting around NOT writ­ing.

Seri­ous­ly, I promise.

Real­ly.

What I (actu­al­ly) tell peo­ple is that, like any art, and real­ly any high­ly tech­ni­cal skill, writ­ing every day is the best way to improve. Musi­cians prac­tice. Artists sketch. Actors rehearse. And the bet­ter the musician/artist/actor, the more they do these things. Only in writ­ing do you find this sense that the artist should sit around and wait until the heav­ens open up and grant them inspi­ra­tion, as if it is genius and mere tal­ent rather than work that makes good writ­ers.

The most insid­i­ous part of this harm­ful lit­tle nar­ra­tive about genius is that even if a writer who isn’t work­ing reg­u­lar­ly should become inspired, they may not have the skill to do any­thing about it. They were sit­ting around when they should have been learn­ing the skill and craft of writ­ing. Now they’ve got a great idea and they real­ly suck at express­ing it.

Inspi­ra­tion is cheap.

Go find some­one who does­n’t have a book or a movie script in their head.

Go find some­one who does­n’t have few chap­ters saved to a zip dri­ve or tucked into a draw­er, or even a rough draft — that’s actu­al­ly the more dif­fi­cult task. Human beings are cre­ative. It’s part of what makes us human. The abil­i­ty to con­vert an idea into lit­tle black marks and have it still be good when some­one (who does­n’t want to sleep with you) reads it — that is the real trick.

Prac­tice is essen­tial for any skill. Pro­fes­sion­al ath­letes don’t sit around on the couch wait­ing to be inspired. And they don’t make the major leagues with­out a zil­lion hard-ass prac­tice ses­sions before their big day in front of the tal­ent scout.

The artists we admire, the ones we love, the ones we want to emu­late, and who we fan­ta­size that our own careers will fol­low the tra­jec­to­ry of — they invari­ably worked very, very hard. I can think of maybe two authors who did­n’t write like they’re run­ning out of time and who had a very small body of works achieve such great suc­cess that they basi­cal­ly built an iden­ti­ty as a writer upon them. [F. Scott Fitzger­ald and Dou­glas Adams] Every­one else writes (or wrote) con­stant­ly and reads when they’re not writ­ing. They did­n’t play video games and tell peo­ple on the chat forums that writ­ing every day makes it feel like work…and then one day they just had a great idea, slapped it down dur­ing NaNoW­riMo and became rich and famous. 

That’s not how any of this works.

So the advice to write every day is for peo­ple who real­ly want to improve, those who want to make writ­ing a career, those who want to be pub­lished nov­el­ists, who pos­si­bly even want a fol­low­ing and fans, and cer­tain­ly those who want to be among the notable fic­tion writ­ers of a gen­er­a­tion.

If that’s not you, then do it as much as you want to be doing it and quit when it no longer brings you ful­fill­ment.

Would you like to know more.…?

I may have said some­thing like this before to an anony­mous hate-mail sender.

And once when I was telling peo­ple they real­ly don’t have to write.

And at least once when the teem­ing mil­lions assured me a writer does­n’t real­ly have to write every day.

And guest blog­ger Amy (a real­ly real writer) once brought down the ham­mer on the “don’t have to write every day” crowd.

Ques­tions? Com­ments? Want a future arti­cle to go into more detail? Mail me through our con­tact form. Just be sure to pick the right top­ic from the drop down menu, and check the archives—particularly the F.A.Q.—to see if your ques­tion has been asked before.

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