Do You Have to Write Every Day? 10 Pros and Cons

Should writers make it a habit to write every day? Is that the secret to success? Is that what distinguishes “real” writers?

I used to think so. Often, when someone would ask me for my single recommendation for other writers, my go-to response was to reiterate some form of the advice from Peter de Vries that I’d had tacked above my desk for almost as long as I’d been writing:

I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

I’ve dabbled in writing ever since I was a kid, but as soon as I got serious, around the time I finished high school, I started making writing a rock-solid part of my daily schedule. For many years, my writing time was firmly 4–6PM every afternoon, and Lord help anyone who interrupted that sacrosanct time. Usually, it was my favorite time of the day; other times, it was the worst, hardest, most agonizing time of the day. But thanks to that commitment to writing for two hours a day for at least five days a week, every week, I outlined, researched, wrote, edited, and published books that otherwise might never have seen the light of day.

Why You Should Write Every Day—And Why Maybe You Shouldn’t

When I say “writing every day,” I don’t necessarily mean every day. What I do mean is creating and sticking with a specific and regular schedule that has you writing more days than not. I still absolutely believe this practice is a secret to success. Certainly, I feel it was instrumental for myself as a young writer building discipline, skill, and experience.

Writing at its best is fun and glorious and an incredible high. But writing is also hard—mind-numbingly, soul-killingly hard sometimes. This is so for many reasons, some of them mental and practical, others personal and emotional. Regardless, it ain’t for the faint of heart. And so sometimes our motivation to keep going through the hard patches needs a little practical support. Solid writing schedules are one of the best methods of support I’ve personally found. The more entrenched the habit becomes, the less resistance the writer finds to showing up at the page.

Plus, how else do you rack up the words? As NaNoWriMo-ers can attest, one of the single best ways to turn a few scribbled sentences into a solid mass of scenes and chapters is to write, write, write. Show up every day, sit there for a designated amount of time, and just go. And keep going. Hours turn into days turn into weeks turn into months—turn into completed first drafts.

In short, writing every day or thereabouts is an amazing practice for any writer to cultivate. This is because writing, just like anything else, is a practice that requires discipline and commitment.

That said, “writing every day” is not a hard and fast rule. In some cases, it won’t even be the best rule. In recent years, my creative journey has taken me into my own uncharted waters. I’ve spent more days not writing than writing, as I’ve explored the world on the other side of discipline and learned that creativity is not always something that can or should show up according to my or anyone else’s schedule.

Today, let’s take a look at what I see as five pros of writing every day, as well as five potential cons.

5 Pros of Making It a Habit to Write Every Day1. Consistency Promotes Discipline

We sometimes refer to writing as a “discipline,” and for good reason. Although it may be borne on the wings of inspiration and powered by the fuel of enthusiasm, writing of any stripe and especially storytelling is a craft of incredible complexity. Learning, growing, and studying to understand how it all works requires enough discipline on its own. Actually putting that into experiential practice is an often herculean effort.

In short, if you intend to stick with writing past the first adrenaline rush of first love, it will require discipline. Consistency promotes that discipline. Making a commitment to show up at the desk every day is what allows writers to ground into the tenacity and focus required not just to keep going with a story but to turn it into something great.

2. Discipline Can Help Create Flow

The word “discipline” sounds harsh. But the cool thing is that the more disciplined we are in maintaining a consistent practice, the easier it actually becomes. My favorite thing about schedules and routines is that they have the potential, when approached mindfully, to transform the hardest parts of life into ritual and flow.

Now, you can’t force this. Just because your almighty willpower determines you’re going to hammer writing into your schedule at a certain time and make it work, does not necessarily mean it will. Early on in my commitment to my writing, I kept reading about how all these admirable writers did their best writing first thing in the morning. I decided to give it a try—even though I am not a morning person. It did not go well. In dread of having to bounce out of bed and immediately rocket my brain into the stratosphere of high-concept thinking, I hit the snooze button more than I ever had in my life. I didn’t get much writing done during those weeks. For my body and my life at that time, the flow just wasn’t there—and as a result, neither was the discipline.

As I’ve gotten older and better at heeding my own daily rhythms, I’ve also gotten better and better at hacking my daily schedule to optimize different tasks to different times of the day. These days, I do like writing in the mornings, but not first thing. Breakfast, yoga, and coffee have to happen first.

3. “Trains” Your Brain to Be Regularly Creative

In correlation with the Peter de Vries quote at the beginning of the post, there’s a school of thought that suggests you can “train” your brain to be regularly creative at a certain time of the day. Basically, you can enhance your own natural flow by training yourself to take full advantage of it.

Whether or not this is actually true, my own personal experience has been that I feel far less inner resistance to work of any kind when I consistently show up for it at the same time every day. Certain other familiar “cues” can also help. For me, turning on background music and having a cup of coffee at hand help me ground my brain into focusing on “writing time.” Over the years, I’ve also played with different “warm-up” routines to help ease my mind and my energy into the right state. These days, I usually just do a quick grounding meditation/visualization to get out of my “chatter brain” and into my body.

4. Promises Steady Productivity

The fastest way I know to rack up a word count is to work on it every day. In general, I’ve always preferred daily time goals (i.e., write two hours) rather than word count goals. I use word-count goals on the occasions when I’m feeling a lot of resistance (aka, spending most of my writing time daydreaming or checking email). But if I’m showing up at the desk regularly and really writing for my allotted time, that’s when I’m most likely to outstrip even the word-count goals. Day after day after day, that adds up fast—and before you know it, you’ve finished the book.

5. Cuts Through Both Excuses and Regret

No matter how much resistance we can sometimes feel toward doing the actual writing, we still tend to feel greater regret and even guilt when we don’t write on a regular basis. Setting up a schedule and sticking to it is one of the best ways to cut straight through the regret of not-writing.

The biggest hurdle to setting up a writing schedule is often our own excuses:

Oh, I just don’t have the time.

Or, My writing isn’t as important as this other thing.

Or, I keep getting interrupted whenever I want to write.

Sometimes we think other people are the ones who don’t respect our writing schedules, but something I learned early on was that others would only respect my writing schedules insofar as I respected them myself. Once that schedule is in place and you’re committed to upholding it, it becomes a shield against both the excuses and the resultant regret that can dog us when we feel unproductive.

5 Cons of Forcing Yourself to Write Every Day

So what about the dark side of writing every day? If it’s as great as the above makes it sound (and it is), then why is there even another side to the conversation?

1. Interrupts Natural Spontaneity—and Sometimes Creativity

As per the de Vries quote, you can train your brain to be creative on demand—to a certain extent. But at the end of the day, creativity and inspiration are linked to spontaneity. If discipline is Order, then I equate creativity with a certain amount of Chaos. Too much order, and you may succeed in eliminating all that scary chaos from your life—but the creativity goes with it.

The creation of and adherence to writing schedules will not, in themselves, unbalance order and creativity. But relying on them mindlessly will. The key is to use discipline as a tool to promote productivity while still keeping your finger on the pulse of your creativity’s needs.

It needs the day off? Honor that.

It wants to write on the weekends this time? Honor that.

It doesn’t like what you’re writing even though you’re determined to finish it? Maybe take a good hard look at that too.

2. Overrides Intuition and Instinct Regarding Personal Patterns and Needs

Probably no surprise that I like Order and err toward it, so it’s also probably no surprise that one of the greatest learning experiences of my adult years has been the discovery that life and its processes cannot be treated like an automated machine. This is directly true of writing, creativity, and art, but more deeply so because all of those things are rooted in the catalysts of life itself—such as intuition and instinct, out of which inspiration and creativity are birthed.

When the practice of writing every day is in flow with our natural rhythms, those rhythms are only enhanced. But if we’re superimposing discipline or willpower over the needs of those natural rhythms, we risk not just cutting ourselves off from them but damaging them.

3. Ignores the Need for Other Types of Creativity

If you’re a one-track-minded writer like me (and bless you if you’re not), it can be easy to forget that you are capable of many types of creativity. Indeed, your writing is just but one face of the creative force innate within you. As I realized during a long hiatus from writing, “I am not a Writer. I am someone who writes.”

Writing cannot happen in a vacuum. Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do for our writing is to not write. Take that scheduled writing time and do something else. Go out and experience life. Learn how to paint, take pictures, dance, decorate, sing. It’s all fodder for the muse. As Henry David Thoreau says in a quote I appreciate more with every passing year of my life:

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

4. Creates Cycles of Failure and Guilt

As mentioned above, writing schedules can be a wonderful tool for overcoming excuses and their resultant regret. But when they’re out of balance, they can also create cycles of failure and guilt. You were supposed to write today, but didn’t? Oops, now the inner critic gets to have a field day.

Examine your relationship to your writing schedules (or lack thereof). They should function as solid support systems to help you ease resistance and lack of motivation. They won’t always make these easy, and sticking with them will sometimes feel like a major inner battle. But you should feel good about them more times than not. If you’re using those schedules and structures to batter yourself into productivity and berate yourself when you fail, it’s time to reexamine what’s really going on.

5. Can Cause (and Intensify) Burnout

You are the master of your schedules, your goals, and your commitments—not the other way around. You are the one choosing to write on a regular basis and enacting a schedule that will help you do so. If, however, you begin to feel that the schedule is becoming the master of you, something is awry. If you refuse to make adjustments and just keep plowing ahead, the result can be burnout. If you still keep going, the burnout gets worse. And as so many people in the last decade or so have discovered, burnout is not something that goes away overnight. It is a real phenomenon of mental, emotional, and physical depletion. Just as with poor nutrition, you can’t build back overnight what you’ve lost over a long period of time.

This doesn’t mean schedules are bad or dangerous. But writing is, first and foremost, a creative emergent. You can’t output and output and output without also scheduling time to refill the well.

***

So… should you write every day? Ultimately, that is a question only you can answer for yourself—based on a deep knowing of your own rhythms, needs, and goals. My shorthand answer would be: Sometimes you should write every day. Scheduling that kind of commitment into your life is a powerful tool, but as with any type of commitment, it comes with costs that must be carefully counted and paid.

The real metric at play here is simply that of balance. Are you balancing a conscious nurturing and care of your creativity against the level of exertion and output you are putting into writing? As long as the levels are commensurate, you’re unlikely to find that writing too much is ever a problem.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! Do you write every day? Why or why not? Tell me in the comments!

Click the “Play” button to Listen to Audio Version (or subscribe to the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast in Apple Podcast or Amazon Music).

___

Love Helping Writers Become Authors? You can now become a patron. (Huge thanks to those of you who are already part of my Patreon family!)

The post Do You Have to Write Every Day? 10 Pros and Cons appeared first on Helping Writers Become Authors.