Write Every Day

Nigh-universal advice for writers, 1/4

The advice to write every day is so common that I am surprised when I find a book about writing that does not offer this advice.

But I resisted. I didn’t want this to be mandatory. I wanted writing to be like other kinds of work: spending more time results in more work getting done. Practice results in improvement. Frequent practice matters because you forget less between sessions. But why exactly daily? Why not three times a week, like weight lifting, with time for muscle recovery? Why not three separate times a day? Tell me why you believe what you do, so I can calculate whether your beliefs apply to me also!

My resistance was not just about epistemic standards. I resisted because I didn’t want this advice to be correct. I wanted to be lazy and successful simultaneously. During the time I was most actively devouring writing advice books, I was not Writing-with-a-capital-W every day, and I doubted that my motivation to write was enough to fuel such a substantial investment. And what if writing just a little bit every day was not enough? What if I then learned I needed to write four hours a day, or six, or eight? That would require a complete life overhaul.

Before I’d do that, I told myself, I’d need to see controlled studies.

These writing-advisors don’t offer controlled studies. They issue proclamations. They hand-wave. In the best case, they talk about how writing daily affects them, but none of them are justifiably sure how it will affect me.

Here’s a sampling of what they have to say.

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler in From Where You Dream:

You may not be ready to write yet, but when you’re in a project you must write every day. You cannot write just on weekends. You cannot write this week and not next; you can’t wait for the summer to write. You can’t skip the summer and wait till the fall. You have to write every day. You cannot do it any other way. Have I said this strongly enough?

Anne Janzer in The Writer’s Process:

It is better to freewrite every day and make no progress on your manuscript than it is to skip days of writing.

Pulitzer-Prize winning poet W. H. Auden:

A modern stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time: decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble.

Stephen King, who offered at least a little reasoning:

Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work, and for most writers that is the smooch of death. Writing is at its best—always, always, always—when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer. I can write in cold blood if I have to, but I like it best when it’s fresh and almost too hot to handle.

…

“Don’t wait for the muse ... This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three.”

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Okay, so let’s say I’ve agreed to write every day. But how? It’s writing time, what do I actually do? What counts? If I am outlining, am I writing? (Most advice-givers say no.) If I am thinking about writing problems, am I writing? (Definitely not, they say.) If I write to my boyfriend every night, does that count as writing? (None of the books cover this question specifically, but I would lean against. It probably matters what kind of writing I do, and how hard I try at it.)

Why does vomiting out a stream of consciousness count for more than these other activities that seem to me to be clearly more productive?

So there’s this seemingly immovable problem. I must write, but I can’t — because I haven’t yet figured out what to write.

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I spent a long time simply being sullen and resentful about this before I finally tackled it directly and reasoned about it. My goal was to decide what counted as writing, in as clear-cut a way as possible. Here are the options I came up with:

Freewrite, à la the Morning Pages of The Artist’s Way. When you freewrite, you’re probably not writing your actual book, you’re just clearing the pipes. A lot of people swear by this.

I have given it a real honest try and it does not feel at all productive to me. I just don’t get anything out of it. Certainly I do not make any progress on my writing project. It’s all just brain noise.

Pants it. Just write, even though you don’t know where you’re going. In some versions of this, a lot of the material will be character sketches or scene sketches that will be thrown away, but that inform the eventual final form.

I have tremendous internal resistance to doing this and I admit I still have not actually tried it. To me, it feels especially hard to do this at the very beginning of a project, when I know nothing about my characters or my setting or what ideas I’m trying to explore. I can imagine it working better in an established world, but I still haven’t gotten over the visceral disgust I feel about it.¹

Write in bite-sized chunks. Every day you figure out what you want to say, outline it, and write it, all in one day. this seems ideal for some forms of writing, such as blogging or writing webfics.

I can do this. I have done this, though never for multiple days in a row. But it still seems very hard to create a large project such as a novel and have it come out well, because I want to produce something that is balanced and tuned throughout. I want to write chapter 25 and then realize that it would work better if I added some hints and foreshadowing in chapters 4 and 7, and it is much cheaper to realize such things at the outlining stage than the writing stage.

On top of that, outlining is hard work, and writing good sentences is also hard work, and they are different kinds of hard work. My brain gets mad at me when I try to do both kinds of hard work on the same piece of writing back to back. This could be just a skill issue, but I think not. When I outline and write on different days, some kind of magical incubation happens in between, and the writing is not just easier but also higher quality.

Redefine “writing.” Declare that thinking, outlining, rearranging index cards, and similar activities do actually count as “writing” — and then find a way not to cheat.

This does seem to work for me. But maybe it is unnecessarily slow? Maybe I dilly-dally in the non-writing phases. Maybe my bottleneck to improvement is in the actual writing and all the other activities are malingering. It’s hard to tell.

I don’t get as much reward signal from this. Nothing is quite as satisfying as completing a chunk of writing. Outlines are hard work and my brain gives a quiet “ding” of reward. Drafts are easier, but my brain goes “DING!” at the end.

Write seasonally. Go through phases of research/incubation/outlining and phases of writing daily.

I have not formally tried this. When I mentally simulate it, it seems like it might work.

Pipeline the writing. Same as above, but have two projects running at once, so that one project is in research/incubation/outlining mode and another project is in active writing.

Even though this requires more total work, it actually sounds better. My brain likes variety and it likes progress. This plan seems likely to yield steadier drips of both.

There will of course be pipeline stall problems, where one project outpaces the other, but I’ve played Factorio, I’ll figure it out.

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While part of me was noodling on this thoughtful option analysis in a detached, academic way, another part of my quietly just started writing every day, even though I still hadn’t seen a controlled study. Sometimes the action-oriented parts of me get impatient and just start working, even if there’s no consensus with the skeptic parts.

As of the day I am writing the first draft of this section, I have three different mandatory self-assigned writing tasks each day, plus several optional ones.² If you sum over many days, I actually produce high-quality words and not just outlines or brain-noise for an average of two of the projects every day. I also pipeline research and thinking and incubation and outlining on several of the others. I’ll tell you how I did it, though I don’t know how much my experience will translate to you.

The hardest part of making a daily commitment to write this project, the one you’re reading right now, was where I would find the time on busy days. Was I really going to write even on days that I was wrangling kids all day? Even on days that I felt sick or tired or busy? And I wanted to give myself as few outs as possible. So I used a big motivational hammer on myself. I made a rule that I was not allowed to play any video games on days when I had not yet completed my writing task for the day. Also, right when I started, I deliberately picked an addictive gretta-bait style of video game and got myself hooked on it, so that I would really want to play.³

This worked surprisingly well! There were a few days when I was just flat-out too tired or busy, and those were the same days I wouldn’t fit in gaming either. But on days when I was simply feeling lazy and didn’t wanna write, there was no way to rationalize it. If I had time to play a game, then I had time to write, and I couldn’t really fool myself about that.

The transformation didn’t take long after that. Maybe just two or three weeks. I no longer need the video game carrot. Now, writing is just the first focus-oriented task I do each day, even on days when I’m single parenting. It’s become a habit. I no longer hem and haw. I don’t always do a lot of minutes of writing in any given day, not yet, but I can see the path from here to there if I choose to walk it. I’m trying not to use too much inner force to get there.

And all that advice from all those writers saying that you just have to write every day… begins just to sound true.

Damn it.

Well, I don’t have a controlled study to offer you either. Like them, all I have is the description of my personal experience.

Before I wrote every day, writing felt hard. It felt like something I needed to gird myself up to do. When I asked myself the question, “will I write today?” I did not already know the answer, and I often found reasons why I could not possibly write today. Writing was a mood, one that I found fleeting and hard to get hold of. And when I did write, and it was hard, that made me less likely to write next time. Projects would get stale and then they would get aversive.⁴

Now that I do write every day, writing is still sometimes hard. Recently I spent hours on a particularly painful chunk of writing, and it felt like trying to knock down a brick wall by running at it and throwing my body against it, again and again — but that is not my typical experience. On a typical day, the task falls easily, and I feel satisfied and accomplished all day after that. As I continue to stack up days on which I write, I grow in justified confidence that I can do this. I begin to identify as a Writer (of non-fiction), and not feel like that’s just a costume I’m trying on, but like an unassailable fact about me.

I’ve also become much more resilient to interruptions. When I started writing every day, I needed solitude and quiet. I needed to engineer my environment, and there couldn’t be any appointments on the calendar for hours.

But as I write this paragraph, my children are sitting twenty feet from me, watching an insipid YouTube show about the Sanrio universe. Sometimes they ask me to get them a fork and I tell them they are welcome to get up and get their own fork. “There’s a silly frog!” remarks the seven-year-old. It’s fine. I keep writing. It doesn’t feel hard. I still would not attempt the trickiest writing, the writing that is also de novo thinking, in this kind of a sensory environment, but most of my writing is not that.

At this point I always think of Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather. Here’s a bit from an article in the New York Post:

In the late 1960s, Mario Puzo retreated to the basement nook that served as his office to work on a new book. The broom-closet-like space beneath his Long Island house had enough room for a desk, a typewriter and little more.

The basement also held a pool table, and while Puzo typed away, his five children would come down and play loud games, forcing Puzo to admonish the brood.

“He’d say, ‘Keep it down, I’m writing a best-seller,’” Puzo’s eldest child, Tony, tells The Post.

I laughed out loud in surprise the first time I read that, but now it feels within reach.

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I want to return to the question about daily writing. This was a part that especially irked me. Again, why seven days a week? Why not three? I have no empirical evidence about this, only guesswork. I did not personally try anything other than a seven-days-a-week schedule.

My guess is that you can absolutely do the same thing, with similar results, three days a week instead of seven. Or the first five days of every month, or every day but only in even months, or whatever you like. But here’s what I think will be different, if you do it that way.

You will be more tempted to cheat, because your brain will have recent examples of days when you didn’t write, and that was nice, and you liked that, and you could have that again today, as a treat. “We can make it up tomorrow,” you might tell yourself. So you will need to guard against that being an available option. You don’t want to get into an argument with yourself every time you mean to write; you want the decision to be behind you, locked in, and now you just write. The advantage of a daily schedule is that there’s nowhere to hide, you can’t just shift the work, it’s right here in front of you and there’s nowhere to displace it.

You’ll have less momentum. When you write every day, it’s always fresh in your mind. You’re in constant close intimate contact with your writing problems. You have fresh bruises from your most recent battles. Because all this is true, you are always working on writing, even when you do other things. When you are in the shower, or doing the dishes, or driving your car, your brain is still quietly turning over the writing problem you faced at your desk this morning, and as you cruise down the highway, suddenly the answer pops into your mind. Now it may be that writing three days a week is also enough to get your brain to do this kind of volunteer overtime for you, but I’m not sure. Try it and report back?

Writing will have to compete harder with other concerns. The more time you spend on writing, the less you have for everything else. This was an argument against writing every day when I thought about it a year ago. Now it’s an argument in favor. Funny how that works. When you give 1% or 5% or 10% of yourself to writing, when writing is your 6th or 10th or 13th priority in life, it’s going to lose a lot more of the time. It’s inessential. It’s going to give way, because there’s always something. But once you become a daily writer, and especially once you start spending multiple hours a day on writing — once writing is 25% or 50% or 75% of your productive hours in a day, and it’s your 1st or 2nd or 4th priority — it is rare for it to get crowded out. It becomes one of the cornerstones of who you are and what you do.

So if you want to try a lighter writing schedule, my suggestion is — just try it! And if you find it hard to stick to your three-days-a-week plan, try seven days a week instead. Counterintuitively, it might actually be easier.

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When I initially circled warily around writing, trying to decide whether to become a daily writer, the seven-day-a-week, multiple-hours-a-day commitment felt too big. It felt like agreeing to marry someone I’d just met, in a culture with no divorce.

But now that writing and I have been dating for a while, the relationship is going pretty well. We spend a lot of time together, and I miss writing when we’re apart. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem so crazy that we might want to move in together. I’m still not sure we’ll get married, but we might.

So I guess, in the end, my biggest beef with all the people who say “you must write every day” or even “you must write for six hours every day” is not that the advice is wrong, but that it’s far too abrupt, it’s out of order. The causality doesn’t flow smoothly in one direction.

I think instead they should say, “if you become a writer, you will eventually find that you are writing for many hours almost every day. This is what it is, to be a writer. To become a writer, you don’t need to start there, and you probably shouldn’t, but that’s what you can expect.”

Probably. I still haven’t run any controlled studies.

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1. My inner incarnation of my friend Logan, who is very good at curiosity, now wishes to stare directly at the visceral disgust and see what it’s made out of. Yes, Logan, that’s a good idea. I guess.

2. Important to note that all of these projects were non-fiction projects, about which I had a lot of intrinsic excitement. I didn’t manifest a solution to the drive-to-write problem. I just chose projects I already felt passionate about.

3. Thank you to Robert, who gave me Graveyard Keeper for my birthday. It was delightful.

4. After my research on motivation systems, I now view this not as a war between my abstract, prefrontal cortex wanting and my dopamine wanting, but rather as a war between different dopamine subsystems. I felt the pull to write, I had the passion for it, but also I had learned that it was hard and sometimes painful. The feedback loop was suppressing my drive to write, rather than pumping it up. By creating a daily habit, I was getting the basal-mumble-ganglia — I really don’t understand this part — involved, and also I was making the experience itself of doing the writing more pleasant and rewarding. And on top of that I became more diligent about tracking progress, which satisfied my return-on-investment-monitor.

So all of the work I describe in this essay was about smoothing out friction in my writing life, rather than about installing the compulsion in the first place.