Writing Every Day

Do you remember being a kid and that constant stream-of-consciousness style droning of good advice from every corner? No, I’m not bashing my mother here – my mother is awesome, but it seems like people telling you what to do were in rather incredible abundance then. Still are, really, even if most of us have developed ways of filtering out most of it through logic and our own life-experiences.

I never once got a bladder infection after sitting on a cold stone. I got it from… other things. I also never caught a cold from wearing too little and I certainly never got my eyes “stuck” after playing contorting my vision by crossing my eyes. I might have gotten a head-ache or two, but that’s all.

I would wager a guess that I am not the only one on whom this had a peculiar effect: I don’t like getting advice. At least, I seem to spend an awful amount of time disintegrating, questioning and belittling it. I am a firm believer of the idea that the only advice most people will actually take, is advice they would have given themselves, too, or have already accepted as something they have come up with before — if possibly not in such pertinent or inspiring wording. It is a bit like reading a book; I always think that the only “new” insights books give us, are the ones we secretly already had but didn’t trust ourselves to put into words. Everything else just passes us by.

Over the years, I have read, heard and inferred enough writing advice to fill a library — and being the secret hipster that I am — it is the advice most often given that I trust the least, see my recent post on the passive voice. (Really, I know I am pathetic sometimes, but being aware of your idiosyncrasies and changing them are two very very different things).

The point is, I have read about writing every day more times than I could possibly count. And it isn’t even that I doubted this one — it always felt a little bit obvious. Oh really, writers write? You don’t say! And always having a job or studies or a million other things to do, I also found this one particularly hard to do and hence, had to push it far, far away from me.

Of course it would be a good idea, but being a writer had to be about quality not quantity and as long as you brought something good to paper when you felt like it… bla bla bla.

Now here I am, blogging, giving advice. Irony, I know.

How about I don’t give you any advice? How about I just tell you what happened to me since I’ve actually written every day (or say, 6 out of 7 days) for a while and you judge for yourself whether I am a freak or whether this resonates with something that you have kind of always known about yourself?

1. It becomes easier.

This is a bit of a no-brainer, really. Writing can be fun – but it can also be work. Hard work. On those days or in those chapters, leaving it lying around for a bit can feel like a relief but it isn’t. For me, that just somehow invigorated the idea that I can only write at certain times or that writing is reliant on something like inspiration. It is not. Not for me anyway. For me, coming up with chapters and plots and how everything is connected to each other requires higher brain power, a good night’s sleep, a creative mood — but just writing those ideas is down is something I can do any day.

And then after I have been doing this for a while, it isn’t so hard. Starting still is sometimes but the moment I full-screen my text-processor and give me a word-count to reach or a time-frame, I power through and it becomes normal. It becomes like any of those other things I have to do every day even if in that particular moment I might not entirely feel like it.

2. It changed my brain.

This is the more interesting effect, I have noticed. I know I have read about this before – that advice of describing mundane things in your head or on paper to get used to doing this or to write every day just to get your brain used to thinking in this way. But it’s really true! (Who would have thought! lol)

It is a bit like learning how to dance or how to speak a new language and you constantly think: “My legs just don’t go that way!” or “My tongue just can’t do that!” — except with writing, I never knew I was lacking something important. I never thought: “Gah, my brain just doesn’t work that way.”

Now that it does, however, I can’t stop wanting to feed it and to keep it agile. It feels as though slowly and through writing basically every day since August, pathways have been forged or unclogged, cut through the under-bush of everyday mundanity. And these pathways are a new way of thinking, of translating every impression into ideas and sentences, into metaphors or scenes.

This morning, I was out in the snow to shoot some footage for my book trailer and when I came back I looked at myself in the small elevator mirror. My hair, my eye-brows, even my lashes were covered in tiny, sparkling drops of water where the snowflakes had fallen softly enough in a way rain never does and then when they melt, you end up glittering all over. I saw this and instantly wanted to go back to my novel.

Or two weeks ago, I had a pretty bad cough and I didn’t write for 2 days because I felt so fluy and disgusting. But then when I did sit down, I gave the character the same cough and described the symptoms and I actually think that made a scene that was very bland in my head a lot better and a lot more plot pertinent.

I also end up with ideas for new stories from everywhere. A lot of my recent emotional landscape coalesced into a new idea for a YA novel about introversion. Then I talked to a therapist about how there are a lot of people who find it difficult to cope with the being flooded with information from everywhere all the time, and the next day, I wrote down some notes on a dystopian novel I might write one day.

It’s so much fun! I love my brain in this state, it makes me feel that perfect freedom of the mind that so many poets have been describing over the years. It’s an escape, a place where I can fly however bogged down I feel in reality.   So yes, thank you all you people who have tried to give me this piece of advice for years. I get it now! I love writing every day!

photo credit: Βethan, Olivander, "The Wanderer's Eye" via photopin cc