“Writers write, every day” is one of those things you’ll hear a lot when you’re coming up as a writer. It’s one of those easy bits of advice that every single writer seems to throw around, implying that if you ever let a 24-hour period go by without putting some words down, your writing ability shrinks like some sort of role-playing character attribute afflicted by a mysterious roll of the die.
This is bullshit.
You know what? If you don’t feel like writing today, don’t. I guarantee you it won’t have any ill effects.
Making Writing a Chore
Look, as with most common advice in the writing world, there’s a kernel of goodness in the “write every day” scold. You do need to commit to writing if you’re going to finish everything, and getting words down on paper or pixel requires discipline. Boiling that down to the one size fits all admonishment that “writers write every day” takes the complex issue of how you can get work done and turns it into a flashy bit of pithy advice. In my experience, the pithier the advice, the less useful it is.
Only you know your schedule. Only you know the state of your mental exhaustion. Only you know whether you’re inspired or not tonight. And if you’re exhausted, or uninspired, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn’t take a day off and go play some video games, or read someone else’s writing. Plenty of famous, successful writers take time off from writing, sometimes going a very long time between projects. When it comes to your writing schedule, you do you.
Of course, if you always give yourself permission to do something else, you will fall into the trap this pithy advice is designed to prevent: You’ll never get anything done. The point though, is that you have to figure out how to defend against that. Maybe making yourself sit down and write every day works for you. Maybe it doesn’t. It’s up to you.
For some, the whole “writers writer every day” thing is more about identifying as a writer and less about actually creating great stories. If forcing yourself to write every day without fail works for you, great. If it doesn’t, don’t fret. You’re still a real writer.
That last paragraph identifies, I think, the most insidious form of this “rule”: You know that you’re a writer if you write every day, or you can’t NOT write. The implication of this is, if you DON’T write every day, or you DON’T feel that writing is the only thing keeping you alive, then you’re not really a writer. If that’s true, then I’m not a writer. And neither are a number of successfully published authors.
Exactly! As someone currently trying to peddle writing advice, the pressure to have a pithy bit of wisdom for everything is real. Sometimes you have to just take a step back.