It was probably over
twenty years ago I read the advice that if you wanted to be a capital W Writer,
you needed to write every day. I thought
that was a great idea, and so I started keeping track of how many days in a row
I wrote. At first, hitting a milestone,
like 30 days, or 100 days, or 365 days, was great. But after a while, there aren’t that many
milestones. The day this is posted, we
be the 2853rd day I’ve written. (That’s
7.8 years.)
Writing every day for
over seven years sounds impressive, and if I had been writing a thousand words
a day, it would be. But several hundred
of those days my “writing” consisted of opening a document, reading a couple of
sentences, changing a word, and calling it a day.
There are plenty of
reasons why one would not feel up to writing.
Maybe there was a death in the family, or you broke a rib and can’t get
comfortable so you basically haven’t slept in a week, or maybe half your
country voted for an authoritarian asswipe.
If you hold yourself to the “I must write every day,” mindset you’ll end
up with many bleh days of writing. And
yes, bleh writing can always be edited into good writing, but after years of
following it, I think Write Every Day should be seen as a guide, not a
rule. So if you want to try writing every
day, just remember that writing is like any other job, and you can take sick
days.
Will I be taking any sick
days? Well, maybe after mid-April when I
hit 3,000 days. We’ll see.
***
Image from Pixabay.