The other day The Duchess came across me lying on the couch, with no fewer than three cats stretched out on top of me like frogs riding on the gnarled back of a crocodile. Startled out of a nap, I cried out “Ho bisogno di una guarnizione!”
“Working hard on that novel, huh,” she said.
“Dammit,” I said, sitting up and sending cats tumbling to the floor. “This is writing.”
Something that gets lost in translation is how much writing is not writing at all. People get hung up on word count or other metrics tied to the whole butt-in-chair business of writing stories or novels or horrifying ‘content’ for Internet sites in exchange for filthy lucre, but writing is a lot of other things. Research, yes, that can be part of it. Also, reading other people’s work, other books and stories, which means that an afternoon spent in a sunbeam reading a book is writing.
Also, watching movies or TV shows or listening to music, because you never know when your slithery little underbrain will steal something and mill it into an idea for your story.
Also, thinking. Just sitting somewhere having a think on your story or some aspect of your world-building or, generally, anything at all is writing.
Also, naps. Anything that fuels you or feeds your creativity. Stuck and can’t write your way out of something? Take a nap. Go for a walk. Play a game. Let your mind wander a bit. That’s writing too.
Getting words on the screen is vital; literally no story has ever existed unless someone put some words on the screen or page. But that’s not all it is, and if all you do every waking moment is type type type, feverishly chasing word count goals and completed projects, you won’t be doing your best work because you’ll only be doing half the work. Fifty percent of writing is a mysterious subconscious process. You have to give yourself the leeway to let that process grind.
Of course, for me personally a huge percentage of my writing time looks like I’m sipping a delicious whiskey while staring off into the middle distance with a pensive expression on my face just in case someone is somehow taking a photo of me at that exact moment. This is also writing, no matter what The Duchess says.