Over the past several years I’ve tried to write every day. On a good weekday I get into the office about 6:30am and try to write until around 9 or 10am, and I set a word limit of about 1500 words. I started this habit because I realized that I wasn’t anywhere near as good as I wanted to be at taking the ideas I had in my head and putting them on paper, and I figured out that the only way I could become better was to do it everyday. As opposed to treating writing as the product of inspiration, I had to treating writing as the product of persistent effort.
Kiese Laymon put it this way:
We’re not good enough to not practice.
I probably shouldn’t give writing advice to folks who aren’t my students, but oh well. One of the hardest parts of writing is committing to a routine, committing to regular practice. That’s crucial. I write and revise almost 4 hours a day because I don’t have kids yet, and I’m not good enough not to practice. You probably aren’t either. If you don’t commit to a routine, you’re likely to think everything you finish is good simply because you wrote it. It’s not. It’s probably really somewhere around just okay, or lightweight bad. But even that lightweight bad work is important because there’s likely a sentence, a paragraph, a word or two in the piece that’s doing some important work. It’s okay to write 3000 words to find 15 that really glow. That is the work.
We’re not good enough to not practice.
Given the whole “publish or perish” thing, there’s a way to articulate this that makes it sound like another disciplinary project, a project that at the end differentiates between the “worthy” and the “unworthy”. I don’t think of it that way.
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