Should You Write Every Day?

August 2, 2007
Joe Konrath had a recent post on his blog concerning 9 writing myths. His first one was Writers Write Every day. Here's what he had to say:

Myth #1 - Writers Write Every Day
I'm sure there are some writers who actually write every day, who force themselves to sit at their computers until they get their three hours, or four pages, or 1500 words. I'm not one of them. I do prioritize my writing, as all writers should. It's important to submit stories, finish books, meet deadlines. Hence the label writer. But in today's hectic world, I simply can't find the time to write every day. If you can't find the time either, don't sweat it. Write when you can. You can prioritize something without being a slave to it.

I don't actually disagree with Joe here and I think his last line: "You can prioritize something without being a slave to it" is absolutely true for a balanced, enjoyable life.

But, should you write every day?

I'm a fulltime writer, which means I make a living doing it, but I don't write every day. I try to. Although actually I now try to take weekends off unless my deadlines get crazy. But a significant chunk of my workdays are spent on research, interviews, transcribing interviews, promotion and just generally dithering around.

At the same time, I think there's a point in your life if you're trying to break into this business, if you're trying to develop your craft to a professional level, that you should probably try to write every day.

I also think that if you're honestly in love with writing and have fantasies about doing it for a living, you're kidding yourself if you're not compulsive about sitting down at the keyboard and writing just about every day. (But that's okay. If you can't lie to yourself, who can you lie to?)

As a fulltime freelancer, I pretty much treat it like a 9-5 job (more or less). In the summer I'm actually to my desk earlier than during the kids' school year, but I typically am to my desk by 9:00, work until 10:30 or so, go to the gym, then catch lunch, then work from 12:30 or 1:00 until 5:30 or 6:00. I'll work in the evenings and weekends if necessary or if I'm caught behind a deadline (it happens from time to time).

Other freelancers, like, say, Eric Mayer and Mary Reed, I believe tend to work more like noon to eight or nine (or ten or eleven or twelve). I heard freelancer and novelist Lev Raphael say once that he couldn't stand a regular schedule, it was soul deadening or something like that, so he works more irregularly. I think that's fine if it works for you.

Ultimately, one thing I've noticed about writers who actually make a living at is we get a lot done. If that means we sit our asses in the chair at 8:00 in the morning and work until 5:00 like a real job, then so be it. If we're night owls and prefer to work at night, hey, if it works for you. My friend Tobias S. Buckell seems to be much more of a crash-through-the-night kind of writer.

I like to point out a couple things to people who say, "I don't have time to write."

One is, we all have 24 hours a day. What we do with it is pretty much up to us. If you can't find time to write in that period, it's probably not that important to you. That's okay. Life is full of other things to do that you might find more rewarding.

Two, when I worked 9:30 to 6:00 at the lab in Detroit, had a 1 to 1.5 hour commute both ways, with young children, I still found time to write. Not much time. Thirty minutes, maybe an hour. Typically after the kids went to bed at 9:00 or so in the evening. A lot of times I would be so tired or fried that I didn't want to go down to the office and write. But most of the time I would say: Come on, write one page. You can do that in five or ten minutes, then you'll be done. Then I'd go to my office, write a page and it would often turn into two or three or five pages. Because writing energized me. But if it was a struggle, I wrote the one page and called it good.

One page a day for a year is a novel.

THE DEVIL'S PITCHFORK was mostly written during my lunch hour in longhand at the hospital where I used to work. I had other writing projects going on that paid me some extra money and those were my writing priorities in the evening, but I wanted to keep writing novels, so that's when I found time for it.

So, do you HAVE to write every day? No, of course not.

SHOULD you write every day? Well, that's up to you. Priorities and all. But if you have hopes of getting published and maybe even making money doing it, chances are you're going to need to write every day for at least a while. It's like any other skill, whether playing the guitar, painting, cooking or baseball. You might have talent, but it's going to take practice--regular practice--to get good at it.

I do want to confess something, though. Over the years, as I was able to write a novel a year (at least) while still managing to hold down a day job, I was puzzled as to what fulltime novelists did with their time. Like a lot of aspiring novelists, I dreamed of writing novels fulltime (still do) but on my more honest days couldn't quite figure out what they did with their time. Unless you're one really slow-ass writer, it just doesn't take 8 hours a day, five days a week, 50 or so weeks a year to produce a good, clean, publishable 400 page manuscript.

Now I understand that a lot of time and energy goes into promotion, etc., but even then, I have to wonder. I'm a fairly fast writer, but even if I slowed way down, I can't imagine a fulltime writer (except maybe William Styron) only writing a paragraph a day or a page a day when they have all day to do it. Anyway, I'll let you know if I ever get to that point.

Cheers,
Mark Terry