(no subject)
23/12/13 09:35![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomy(Via Karen Healey's tumblr)
"You have to write every day" is the "Eat less, exercise more" of writing advice.
It's not advice. It's a way of saying "You're doing it wrong, therefore I have no need to engage with anything that you're actually struggling with. This is very simple and the fact that you're struggling with it proves that you're unworthy of further consideration."
The basic thing is that I have spent years telling myself things would have gone better if I had been more dedicated, and the proof that I wasn't dedicated enough was that I didn't write every day. Didn't write every day when I had a broken finger, didn't write every day when I was undergoing a series of increasingly silly medical tests, didn't write every day when I was going through bad stuff at work, didn't write every day when I was traveling and busy from dawn to bedtime.
And part of being a writer is figuring out how to carve out time in your life for it, and not just be the person who keeps promising and promising themselves that they really will start writing that book this year. But it is not always an easy question to figure out. And it is not the magic talisman that separates the sufficiently serious people from the wannabes.
"You have to write every day" is the "Eat less, exercise more" of writing advice.
It's not advice. It's a way of saying "You're doing it wrong, therefore I have no need to engage with anything that you're actually struggling with. This is very simple and the fact that you're struggling with it proves that you're unworthy of further consideration."
The basic thing is that I have spent years telling myself things would have gone better if I had been more dedicated, and the proof that I wasn't dedicated enough was that I didn't write every day. Didn't write every day when I had a broken finger, didn't write every day when I was undergoing a series of increasingly silly medical tests, didn't write every day when I was going through bad stuff at work, didn't write every day when I was traveling and busy from dawn to bedtime.
And part of being a writer is figuring out how to carve out time in your life for it, and not just be the person who keeps promising and promising themselves that they really will start writing that book this year. But it is not always an easy question to figure out. And it is not the magic talisman that separates the sufficiently serious people from the wannabes.
(no subject)
23/12/13 19:43 (UTC)I am certainly not opposed to a goal of trying to write every day, but using that as some kind of demarcation of WHO IS AND IS NOT A WRITER is ... not good, to say the least. For reasons you describe, but also because it doesn't leave any room for alternate processes. I try to tell students that "what works" in writing is figuring out what your process is and letting that work for you. Sometimes that might include not actually writing for a while (to recouperate, to let things percolate, to get a fresh view on the work, because your life jumped up and bit you, whatever). Your process is what it is; I have little patience for writers who believe that THEIR process is THE process for everyone.
(no subject)
23/12/13 22:28 (UTC)