How should a writer write?
I’m thinking a lot about how I want and need to structure my days. Not just my workdays, but especially my workdays. And most especially my writing days, which are, ideally, the majority of my workdays. (Remember my book?) Here’s an incomplete list of approaches that have not worked for me, so far.
1. Writing can and should happen whenever I have time, whether that means in long uninterrupted chunks or in short bursts between other appointments.
2. Writing can and should happen only in long uninterrupted chunks, ideally taking up the entire workday. (Which is not, has never been, and will never be eight hours, but you know what I mean.)
The first idea, that writing should fit in every temporal gap I have, would seem to center writing as my most important activity, but it actually devalues it by making it the last thing I schedule (or something I don’t schedule at all and expect to do anyway). It also devalues focus and flow, which are arguably the best parts of writing, by not guaranteeing the time it takes to develop them, and also making it likely I’ll have to interrupt them. The second idea prioritizes writing to the exclusion of everything else, which isn’t realistic (at the very least, I also have to do research and interviews), and it sets me up to feel like I’ve failed every time I can’t write the whole day. And even when I can write the whole day—which for me usually means 2-3 hours before lunch and 1.5-2 hours after—it’s so exhausting that there’s no way I can do it the next day, too, much less the day after that. It’s like sprinting. Going all out can feel amazing, and it definitely has its place, but it isn’t possible to sustain. It’s not supposed to be.
Journalism trains you to write in sprints. Breaking news obviously has this structure, but even when I’m not doing particularly fast-moving stories, the writing still happens in bursts, interspersed by breaks when the piece is being edited and/or I get my next idea or assignment. I’m glad I (usually) get that downtime—not everyone does—and I’ve learned how to make the most of it. What I haven’t learned is how to write at a pace that isn’t stop-and-go. I haven’t learned how to write every day, and more importantly, trust that I will write every day.
To be clear, writers don’t need to write every day. And when I say every day, I probably mean five or six days a week, 2-3 hours per day (or less!), and with one of those days going toward a pressure-release side project, like this newsletter. But a certain kind of magic (Big Magic?) happens for me when I can get into an everyday writing rhythm. Up until recently, I’ve thought that when the writing is going well, I do it every day. But now I’m starting to see that I’ve got the causality backward. The reality is that when I write every day, the writing goes well. I enjoy it, I feel confident in what I’m creating, and I trust myself to keep showing up.
The events of 2020 cleared my path to experience the power of everyday writing for the first time. The events of 2021 have thrown me off the path at every single turn. Problems, doubts, and insecurities I thought were behind me have appeared in my way again, and brand new ones have joined them. This has been frustrating, to say the least. It’s felt like my writing practice is a ship that’s struggling to stay on course through a storm. It would be great if the storm stopped, obviously, but I can’t control that. The storm is the storm. What I can do is to think of everyday writing not as the ship, but as the anchor. The steady, reliable thing I can drop down in my day that keeps everything else from capsizing completely.
The way I put this in practice will likely be incredibly basic: Block out two hours every day for writing, ideally the same two hours, and protect that time at all costs. It sounds so…obvious. Painfully obvious! When I write about creativity and productivity, I often feel like I’m hacking my way through a dark forest, alone, not sure where I’m going, only to arrive at a well-lit car campground where all the productivity bros have been chilling for years, grilling steaks outside their multi-room tents. Schedule your writing time in advance, and make it a routine. What was so hard about getting there, to the most banal creativity advice in the world? I don’t know. All I can say is that it feels different this time, when I’m listening to myself instead of everyone else. Even if, in the end, we’re all saying the same thing.