(I’m jumping right in without recap from part 2.)
Or go all the way back to part 1.
So back to our two young hopefuls: Assuming Bolt and YoYo Ma are generous people, they would likely have very different answers once they knew that simply practicing every day might be impossible. And most writers are probably kind and generous and would give different advice as well to folks who couldn’t write daily (rather than simply didn’t want to).
Of course, some will continue to be jerkwad dill holes. Writers are not a monolith. Maybe they just have critical empathy failure. Maybe they answered too many “How do I make it?” questions from desperate twenty-year-olds and can’t pop their clutch out of jerkwad gear. Maybe they just have too damned much dill in their holes. Regardless, they will ignore that not all lives are as untrammeled as their own, and shrug and say, “[Insert shitty and problematic thing here]”. They will ignore that not all brains function with the same alacrity or clarity, or that not all emotional realities create enough room for writing. Or that some chronic illness requires medications that leave one fuzzy-headed. They will say shit like, “If you really wanted it…” or “This is not that hard….” or the fourteenth-place runner-up for shittiest thing ever said by a human to another human, ever: “You’re just making excuses. Try adjusting your attitude.”
In fact, I’ve spent some time BEING one of these folks. For months, while I was dealing with cancer and its treatment, I could get to my keyboard most days, but definitely not every day, and sometimes weeks went by before I was able to write something publishable. Then that series of unfortunate events happened, and it was just one major trauma after another—miscarriages, liver failure, one of my partner’s friends murdered, eviction, chronic illness, and the ongoing fallout of it all. I watched my income from my pre-cancer days shrink to a third of its size. I knew that I was going to have to write every day if I wanted to get back to making money again, and at no time did I not feel like I was some sort of “real” writer. But I just couldn’t. I would sit down and stare at the screen, and instead of the words coming in those quiet moments, my thoughts would bang back and forth between my traumas, like a pinball bouncing between the bumpers.
But I do bring glad tidings. If you can’t write every day, all hope is not lost. Writers who can’t write every day can focus on what they CAN do, maximize their efficiency, understand their expectations, and generally have no choice but to be more efficacious with their time and energy.
We aspiring writers turn to those who have achieved what we want because they’ve walked the path ahead of us. They can tell us what to expect in terms of effort, give us tips on process, maybe help us with our craft, and they can likely point out a few dangers to avoid. And even though they may have some ideas for how to maneuver their path around obstacles they themselves never encountered, there is ever the danger of people with privilege lecturing those without on what they “ought to do.” So take anything they (or even I) say with a grain of salt or two (or three). Seeing the world through a privileged lens means that the best we can do is listen, have empathy, and imagine, but sometimes privilege creates an inability to really register things as obstacles because they never have been for us.
Remember that we’re talking about a general inability to write daily. But really, each particular flavor of that obstacle is going to be a little different. Getting general advice about how to work around not writing every day from someone who has overcome debilitating ADD might be generally useful, but not specifically helpful for someone who has bipolar disorder, for example, and is barely able to get out of bed when depressed. So take this advice with a few more grains of salt than before. You might want to find other writers struggling with the same circumstances.
And I promise you that they’re out there.
And as always and ever, do what works. If I tell you that you should write every day, it’s not because I like pissing 70–80% of you off. It’s because a gazillion successful writers told me that writing every day works, and yes, so did dozens of my friends and hundreds of my readers who gave it a shot and sent me testimonials. And those writers who say it’s no big deal? They don’t seem to have those shiny career paths that make us wannabe writers drool. But maybe (and this would be rare, but maybe) it just isn’t how your brain rolls. Or you can’t write every day, but you’ve worked out a magnificent checklist system for writing for twenty hours a week. And then you have to do what works, and just hammer it out on your own.
You have to have a shocking amount of self-honesty if you want to have a writing career. (“Yes, I’m making excuses. No, that writing is not that good. Yes, I need an editor. Yes, actually writing every day helps, and I’m saying I have special snowflake creativity because I don’t want to do the work.”) It’s nobody’s fucking business to judge you, but a lot of people have died without ever finishing that book they wanted to publish. And a lot of them lied their way to the grave, telling themselves they were the exception to ubiquitous writing advice like “Read a lot” or “Write every day.” They were the exception… until one day they weren’t.
However, there is an interesting opportunity for people who can’t write every day. It’s technically available to those who can, but we are less likely to avail ourselves of it. When you’re a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And when you have time and a cooperative brain, every writing malfunction can feel like you need to just throw more and more and more time and practice at it. Not getting published? Let’s write another ten hours a week. Work not coming together? Two more hours each morning.
It’s not that this approach is wrong (the way to get better at writing IS to write), but sometimes it can drift into the realm of working harder and not smarter. A lot of writers write a LOT, but don’t take a lot of care to be deliberate and thoughtful about how they write. They just sort of power through it, like every problem can be solved with a “lot” more hours of good, hard work. There’s a certain elegance and purpose that a writer can bring to their productive moments when they don’t necessarily have the luxury of powering through with brute writing muscle. Part 4 of this article is going to come out tomorrow, and it is going to be its own stand-alone Listicle: A Dozen Ways to Help You Not Write Every Day If That’s Your Jam
Stay tuned…
Leave a Reply