Quite late last year, I subscribed to A Writer’s Diary, Toby Litt’s Substack, where he posted something every single day on some aspect of the experience of writing. This is from his entry for 27th December, a post entitled On The Worst Writing Advice Ever (Revisited):
If I were to sum up, then I’d say this was the least liked advice —
Write every day.
This was unpopular because it assumed there was even the slightest possibility of getting something down, given work, caring responsibilities, mental health, everything.
Considerable anger was expressed about this presumption.
This mantra, this approach, this suggestion, this habit, this ideology seems to come up a lot in all kinds of discussions about writing practice, and everyone who writes (or wants to write) seems to get entangled by it at some point — in our own heads and especially in conversation with other people. I’ve come to my own modest conclusions on the matter and I’ll try and explain them below.
I’ll start with a full disclosure of what might be the pinnacle of my hypocrisy, or might instead be the basis of a useful realisation: while I’ve never, ever gone in for writing every day myself, it is something I have encouraged some other people to do, under certain circumstances.
I think there are two fundamentally different kinds of writers — and I’m not about to say the professional ones and the non-professional ones, the paid ones and the unpaid ones, the published ones and the unpublished ones, the serious-about-writing ones and the not-serious-about-writing ones. The less kindly part of me has been tempted to divide them into writers who are writing and writers who are not writing, but that’s not quite right either.
The distinction I’d prefer to make is this: on one hand, writers who have already discovered how good it feels to make time to write as often as they can, and on the other hand, writers who have yet to discover how good it feels to make time to write as often as they can.
I think this is an especially helpful, positive and proactive distinction to make at the beginning of a new year, when there’s a renewed openness to establishing practices which support well-being, change, growth, validation or reprioritisation of many kinds.
Writers who have already discovered how good it feels to make time to write as often as they can do not need to impose a must-write-every-day routine on themselves, because they have already reached an awareness of something — the fact that writing is an essential component of their basic sense of self.
They do not, therefore, need to practice the literary equivalent of an exercise or diet regime, meeting a target of X words each day or committing to spending Y minutes or Z hours each day writing. They know they will write when they can, because they are already actively attuned to carving out as many opportunities to write as possible. They are at an advanced stage of the journey of saying yes to writing by saying no to other things.
This does not mean to say that they always manage to carve out as much writing time as they would like, or that they unfailingly manage to say no to everything that tries to encroach on their writing time — but on the whole, except at periods of extreme stress or overload, they will manage to make sure it’s not too long before they get stuck into some writing again, and when they do, they’ll savour the familiar feeling of immersion in writing that’s like easing yourself into a not-quite-but-almost-too-hot bubble bath.
Writers who have yet to discover how good it feels to make time to write as often as they can are in the foothills of their journey towards the place I was describing in the last three paragraphs, and I’m always very excited to meet people who are on that journey, because I sincerely hope they will get to the place where they can feel what I feel about a life with lots of writing time in it.
But these are people who, for many reasons, might currently be finding it much harder than me to say yes to writing and to say no to other things. Those other things in their lives are doing a great job of stimulating the voices inside their heads which nibble away at their confidence in their ability to write, or their value as a writer, and at some point, it just becomes far easier, far safer, far less scary, to write very seldom or to not write at all.
(Conversely, I honestly don’t think I’ve yet met anybody who had unshakeable belief in their ability and value as a writer who was NOT making time to write — those people get the writing done, and then also seem to find lots of time to complain that no-one is publishing or paying them for what they’ve written.)
So there is, I think, an argument still to be made for writers who have yet to discover how good it feels to make time to write as often as they can establishing some kind of regular writing habit each day. An hour is an amount of time which has a dignity and fullness to it that Western society seems to find arbitrarily satisfying. But in this context, any amount of time will do, provided it truly functions as a step along the path for that writer and their writing. Thirty minutes. Fifteen. Five. (I doubt going lower than that would be of much help.)
The default and fatuous statement about doing this daily practice goes along the lines of: “By the end of the week, you’ll have done # hours/minutes and you’ll have # hours/minutes’ worth of writing to show for it.” Alongside that, there’ll be some vague inspirational muttering that it doesn’t matter about the quality of what’s been written — the act of writing is what’s most important.
The quality does matter, though. It matters very much. But it’s hard to get to a place where you can be discerning about what you’re writing, if you’re not writing very often. The discernment comes as a direct by-product of time spent writing, and it’s the writers who have already discovered how good it feels to make time to write as often as they can who are well ahead on that front.
There’s no quick fix here, no switch to flip, no flatpack furniture equivalent to leapfrog anyone from being one kind of writer to another. Those of us who get here did so by making it happen for ourselves, in our own time, at our own pace, and once we’ve made the discovery, I suspect it’s impossible to forget how good it feels. Not everyone will get there, though, and that’s fine. Not everyone is cut out for it, which simply means there’s something else they’re better disposed to doing and enjoying more than writing. We only ever find out by trying.
So, if you’re a writer who has yet to discover how good it feels to make time to write as often as they can, or you have such a person close to you in your life, take this as a nudge to encourage yourself/them to make a commitment to do some regular writing soon. You/they get to choose how much and how often. And with practice and perseverance, you/they can hopefully get to a place of not needing that self-imposed daily practice anymore, because by then, you/they will have found that writing is an essential component of your/their basic sense of self.
And then the real fun begins.