Luc Reid - How Writing Every Day Changes Everything

It was about 10:30 or 11:00 PM on New Year's Eve, 2007, and I was at a party at the house of some friends, when the conversation shifted to New Year's resolutions. I mentioned that I never do them ... and then realized that this year I wanted to do one. With everything that had been going on in my life (and I'm a single parent with a full-time job who runs both a singing group and a large online writing group, so that is a lot), I hadn't been getting much writing done lately, despite my best intentions. So after thinking it through for a few minutes, I actually did make a resolution: I was going to write every day for 2008.

The rules were pretty lenient: there was no minimum length, and the writing could either be generating new material or making at least sentence-sized changes to existing material. However, all of the writing had to be for publication: no journal entries, blogs, etc. would count.

So I started. It was awkward at first. It would get to be time to go to bed, after a day full of things to do, and I'd realize that I hadn't written yet--so I'd sit down, chip away at making meaningful edits on some piece I wanted to get out the door for just 10 or 20 minutes, then turn the computer off and head to bed.

Within a couple of weeks, I had cleared out all of the projects that I felt were overdue and needed immediate attention and was able to get back on track with a novel I was working on.

This was more difficult. I wasn't entirely clear on where I was going with the novel, and because I was getting in my writing time late in the day, I really didn't feel like spending some time planning the story, then spending more time writing the story. So I tried just writing, an approach that has worked well for me some of the time before. Within a few weeks, it was clear I was driving myself through a trackless wilderness. Just Writing might work for me for some projects, but this one required a lot of thought and planning to come off well, and it wasn't working out. I began working on another project instead, one that I knew was more straightforward and would come out more easily.

But thinking back on that experience, I soon realized that I needed to change my resolution: my writing time could be for writing an actual piece, but it could also be for planning a piece, in writing (daydreaming and straight research wouldn't count).

Feeling I had gotten off track with the novel I had been "just writing," I set it aside and got to work on a new project, one that required a lot of brainstorming, imagination, ideas, and planning--and I've been working on it every day since. What I've found is that my brain has gotten fired up with the story, and since I don't take more than a day away from the old story forge at a time, the coals are still hot when I next get back to them, and just need me to blow across them a little for the flame to leap back up. This is <i>much</i> better than writing from a cold start: this is jumping into the saddle and having the horse break into a gallop.

Writing every day has become easier since I started, and I've found more opportunities to do it. So far, one quarter of the way through 2008, I've missed one day (when I was both sick and on vacation). As nice as perfection is, missing one day is fine for me. If I miss one day per quarter for the whole year, I'll consider that a massive victory.

And there have been more benefits, surprising ones. I find that before I go to sleep or when I'm driving, I'm working on the book in my mind: I've obtained a limited amount of that enviable obsession that produces idea after idea, insight after insight, into a project. I'm re-reading a favorite writing book at night now (Donald Maass' <i>Writing the Breakout Novel</i>, which I recommend highly), and as I go through it, I find myself easily able to see how Mr. Maass' insights can apply to my book, and what I need to do. The characters are getting richer and more human, the plot more surprising and satisfying, the milieu more real and engrossing.

So here's my advice to you: if you're serious about writing and you currently only write  every once in a while, perhaps because you really, honestly don't have the time (or just because you like to relax), try instead--just for a month or two--writing every day. Don't set high word count requirements, but follow your regime faithfully. What's interesting is that your work may change not just in the quantity of words you've generated, but in the way it feels to you to write it. After the first couple of months, writing for me began to feel effortless again, something I had only seen occasionally in the past and that I now suspect had more to do with having gotten into a habit of writing very regularly for a while than with some particular inspiration.

I'm not the first person to try this by any means. Some writers--even other when-I'm-not-at-my-day-job-or-with-my-family writers, like me--have made it a permanent part of their lives, as I may come to do as well. A whole group of us on Codex, my writing group, are doing this. Lots of other people are first. Lawrence Schoen (Codexian, fluent Klingon speaker, and author of a variety of clever short stories published in English and translated into a passel of other languages) started doing it back in 2006 or 2007.

And what about your writing? Would it help you?