Write Every Day–or not….
“Write every day.” It’s one of the most popular pieces of advice to writers. It’s something I have struggled and fought with since I chose to become a writer. Write every day.
I get the thinking behind this advice. You need discipline as a writer. It’s not just when the muse strikes. You need to write through the hard times. The times when you are not inspired to work on the story. You need to have a set period of your day that you say this is my writing time. No one interrupts me.
But I have never written every day. Not when I was doing my MFA in Writing for Children Work. Not when I was writing articles and not when I was writing my six books.
In the beginning I always took Sunday off from all writing and writing business. I recognized I needed one day to not work and in the beginning I was spending almost every Saturday working on articles and short stories.
As I wrote each book, there was a period in the process when I did write every day. During the fast drafting, during the revisions, during the edits, and during the release and promotion–not really writing but there was a lot of blog writing.
But in between those parts of each book there were also many days I did not write. I ran my life. I taught my on-line teaching classes, I taught workshops, I taught educators, I worked on house projects, I learned how to sew and I crafted. I went to yoga, I took the dog for a walk. I had a couple disaster relationships. I traveled to the Oregon coast and I read. I did those things which fed my writing.
I have often been hard on myself the last nine months as I moved from Seattle to Portland. I packed up my office last May and this week I finally could unpack it. And in those nine months, my office lived out of bags and it was not cohesive for my writing process at all. It worked somewhat for my teaching although I had to teach one workshop in November without any of my usual materials because everything was still in storage.I managed, but it wasn’t great.
I couldn’t keep a story in my head. I coudn’t keep characters in my head. I had no solid place to lay out a story board unless I wanted to move it fifty times as I worked around packing and unpacking a house. But the biggest was I just had no room in my head because I moved cities and have had to start from ground zero. Where is the store? Where is the library? What neighborhood works best for me? Where is the yoga class that works for me? How do I get health care? That driver’s license has to be retaken and the teaching certification also has to be retaken for endorsements and other requirements we didn’t have in WA State. How do I hire for painting and a new floor in the room which will become my office? Life decisions took over my story idea space.
And a little part of me spent too much time whispering..You aren’t writing. You SHOULD be writing. What’s wrong with you?
And this struck me….
Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I had…’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not.
It’s not just writing. Shame. I should be further along. I should have x number of books out. I should be making x amount. I should. I should. I should. It’s a killer to the creative process.
But nothing lasts forever and as the shelves went up in the office, the floor was finally finished and the paint done, I could finally unpack the twenty boxes I’d been sitting around for three months. And, as I tossed old files and organized my office this weekend until I finally stood in front of a room that was ready to move forward in it’s new life, I realized that writing was all waiting for me. It was waiting for me to bring new energy and life to it. And it didn’t need me writing every day, what my writing needs is the fresh ideas and new emotions which come when you let life lead you and stop shaming yourself for not writing every day.
