To write or not to write….every day

“Just write every day of your life”
— Ray Bradbury

A current piece of advice floating around Twitter is that one way to approach writing a book is to take the total word count and divide it by the days in a year. Alright, let’s assume 100,000 words is our goal. This is considered a “generally safe” range for mainstream fiction. Taking 100,000 words and dividing it by 365 you get 274. If you take off a couple of days a year for birthdays or holidays then you’re looking at somewhere around 280 words a day.

This is doable. It’s not that much. Yes, some times getting just ten words onto the page can be a challenge. But most days 280 words should not be a Herculean task. This blog is currently at 120 words for reference. If you started today you could be done with your book by this time next year. Well, you will be done with a draft in one year, but it is a draft that can become a great book.

The method of calculating words per day to achieve a novel-length manuscript does have one fundamental assumption—you must write every day. Or most days (360/365) should suffice. In interviews, many authors profess to the idea that writers should write every day. John Grisham in a New York Times article suggests “Do—write a page a day. That’s about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years and you’ll have a novel that’s long enough.” Doing the math on this he is suggesting a book of roughly 104,000 words which is pretty close to our goal from earlier.

As with all writing advice, these are not hard and fast rules. Many authors suggest writing daily because they themselves write every day. It works for them. It keeps them in the flow and is crucial to their personal writing process. When I am working on a novel I do write every day. It helps to keep me in the work and pushing forward.

However, other authors scoff at the idea of writing every day. They chafe against the yoke of forced production. These authors argue that any energy spent completing a work i.e. outlining, daydreaming, journaling, world building, character development etc. go toward the final product. And I won’t argue that point. There is much more to writing a novel then putting words on the page. However, no novel was ever written without putting words one after another on the page.

Writing every day doesn’t have to mean working on a single project. It can be a blog post, short stories, or poems along with your main work. But developing the habit of daily writing is key for building a personal writing process. The metaphor that comes up often is working out. Professional athletes workout every day, but they aren’t only lifting weights. They alternate upper body, lower body, cardio, core, etc. As writers, we can do the same. Complete a short story while working on a larger project. Write poems after getting in your 280 words. As an aside, when I am working on a novel I do not practice this. I focus solely on my WIP, allowing only blogging to interrupt this, but that is my personal writing process. And I only came to this through many years of trial and error.

If you don’t like/don’t want to write every day or often find the task of writing painful or frustrating then you need to ask yourself why you want to write. Writing, for the most part, should be fun. It should be something you want to spend your free time doing. My wife is a photographer. She gets to travel all over the world shooting assignments for travel sites. People often comment on how lucky she is to get to travel for work. What they don’t see are the twenty hour work days, the stress of always being on the clock and the sheer volume of work she produces. These are not fun trips, they are work. But she loves what she does. Similarly, writers should love writing otherwise it’s simply another job.

Whether you write every day or not isn’t the point. Your writing process is your own. But it must work for you. Keep your why always in the front of your mind to help propel you forward. In the end, the only person responsible for achieving your goals is you.