One of the mantras you are taught early in your writing career is that you must write every day. While this has some merits, it isn’t really talking about writing every day, it’s talking about having the discipline to write when you don’t want to write.
Let’s face it, life is a busy thing for humans in this day and age. Everyone is pulling on you to do something, or to give away your money. For those not in the habit of writing regularly, life can be a huge distraction. Skip a day writing, pretty soon it’s two days, a week, a month, and then years go by.
What they really mean by ‘write every day’ is make time to write. Write regularly. It doesn’t have to be every day, but writing every day does help get projects done. When working on long fiction projects, I tend to write every day, and I push myself to meet a daily quota. Sometimes that means staying up late.
Sometimes, like the past two days, I have stuff interfere, but that’s okay. Writers have to live in the real world, too. The secret is to make a concerted effort not to allow the distraction to derail you. After two idle days, it’s very easy to allow that stretch to grow. Don’t let it.
My biggest threat to writing regularly is when I am between major projects. I have to set a target date to start the next one, or I’ll look back at three wasted months.
It’s a question of discipline, and everyone handles that in different ways. You don’t have to write every day, but you do have to write regularly, and make it a priority.
I can’t count how many times,when I tell someone that I write, they tell me they always wanted to do it, too, but they never have time. They don’t want to hear that everyone has that problem, and you have to make time or it simply won’t happen.
