National Day on Writing: Writing Is Something You Do, Not Something You Discuss

A Day to Ask Why We Write

National Day on Writing is October 20. The National Council of Teachers of English established it in 2009 to draw attention to the huge variety of writing people do every day, in school and out of it, and to make writers of all kinds more aware of their own craft. The hashtag they built it around is #WhyIWrite, and the whole day is an invitation to answer that question.

The premise behind it’s right. People think of writing as pencil-and-paper assignments, something teachers graded and you left behind. But writing runs through everyone’s life, in how you work, how you remember, how you communicate. The average office worker writes the length of a novel every year in emails alone. We’re all writers. Most of us just never stop to notice.

So I’ll answer the #WhyIWrite question as a person who has made writing his entire life.

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I Write About 350 Days a Year

Here’s my honest practice. I write virtually every day. Out of 365 days in a year, I probably write on about 350 of them. Some of that is for clients, and a lot of it is for myself, my own books and projects. I love writing. It’s what I do.

There’s a downside too. I probably should write a little bit less and get up and exercise more. But I sit here at the computer and write and write and write. On a normal day I produce between five thousand and ten thousand words. I use voice to text a lot, which has its reliability problems, but it works, and it keeps the words coming when my hands get tired.

My process has one firm rule built in. I write the words one day, then put them aside, and I proofread them the next day. I let at least a night pass before I go back. That gap matters. You can’t see your own fresh writing clearly, the errors hide because your brain reads what it meant to say. A night of distance lets you read what’s on the page. Then it goes to the client, or gets prepped for my own use.

How do you beat writer’s block?

People ask how I keep producing that much without grinding to a halt. The answer is that I run several projects at the same time, on purpose.

When I hit writer’s block, I don’t sit there fighting it. I switch projects.

If I’m working on my novel The Eternal War one day and it just won’t move, I set it down and move to a client book. If I get stuck there too, I move to a different book I have going. Almost always, the act of switching breaks the block, because the block was about that one project. If switching doesn’t work, I get up.

I take a walk. I play with the cat. Then I come back, and usually the words are there again.

It also helps to know what causes the block.

A lot of the time it’s not mysterious or creative at all. It’s staring at a fixed, blank screen until you freeze. And a surprising amount of it is physical, poor eating, blood sugar swinging high or low, blood pressure, plain old medical issues. Your brain runs on your body, and when the body is off, the words stop.

I’ve written about this at length, in the causes of writer’s block and how to overcome it, because it trips up so many writers who think they’ve lost their talent when really they just need to eat lunch and move on to a different chapter.

The One Rule I Give Every Writer

If you want to write, here’s the advice I give everyone, and I believe it completely.

Write on a regular schedule. Not necessarily every single day, but regularly, and I’d say at least five days a week. On each of those days, write at least five hundred words of solid, finished work. By finished I don’t mean ready for publication. I mean a good solid first draft that you have run through, proofread, grammar checked, made sure it holds together. A real draft instead of a pile of notes.

Five hundred words sounds like a lot to a new writer. Five hundred words is barely two pages. You can get there in well under an hour once you stop treating it as a big event.

Just get there. Do it five days a week, and in a year you’ll have written enough words to fill several books. The numbers aren’t the point, though. The habit is the point. Writers who wait for inspiration produce almost nothing. Writers who show up on a schedule produce everything.

Writing Is Something You Do

Here’s the heart of it, and it’s the only philosophy of writing I really hold.

Stop discussing writing, thinking about it, agonizing over it and planning it endlessly. There are useful discussions to have about craft, sure, and useful planning to do. But the act itself is simple. Writing is something you do. You sit down and you put words on the page. Then you do it again tomorrow.

Too many people who call themselves writers spend all their time talking about writing, reading about writing, attending workshops about writing, and almost no time writing.

That’s backward. The talking doesn’t make you a writer. The doing does. The only thing that separates a writer from a person who wants to be a writer is that the writer is currently writing.

So on October 20, for National Day on Writing, don’t just read about it or post about why you write.

Write something. Five hundred words. Anything. Then do it again the next day, and the day after. Answer the #WhyIWrite question with the only answer that counts, the words themselves. That’s what I’ll be doing, the same as almost every other day of the year.

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