A Day to Ask Why We Write
National Day on Writing asks one question: why do you write? The honest answer for me is that it is not really a choice anymore. It is just what I do, almost every day of my life.Share on X
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 is right. People think of writing as pencil-and-paper assignments, something you were graded on and left behind. But writing is woven 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 are all writers. Most of us just never stop to notice.
So I will answer the #WhyIWrite question honestly, as a person who has made writing his entire life.
I Write About 350 Days a Year
I write roughly 350 days out of 365. Some for clients, a lot for myself. I love it. I probably should write a little less and exercise a little more, but I sit down and write and write and write.Share on X
Here is 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 is what I do.
I will be honest about the 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 cannot 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 is actually on the page. Then it goes to the client, or gets prepped for my own use.
How I Beat Writer’s Block
My cure for writer’s block: run several projects at once. When one stalls, switch to another. The block is usually about that one project, not about your ability to write.Share on X
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 do not sit there fighting it. I switch projects. If I am working on my novel The Eternal War one day and it just will not 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, not about my ability to write. If switching does not 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 actually causes the block. A lot of the time it is not mysterious or creative at all. It is 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 have 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 have 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 is the advice I give everyone, and I believe it completely.
Write on a regular schedule. Not necessarily every single day, but regularly, and I would 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 do not mean ready for publication. I mean a good solid first draft that you have actually run through, proofread, grammar checked, made sure it holds together. A real draft, not a pile of notes.
Five hundred words sounds like a lot to a new writer. It is not. 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 will have written enough words to fill several books. The math is not 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 is the heart of it, and it is the only philosophy of writing I really hold.
Writing is not something to be discussed. It is not something to think about or agonize over or plan 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 actually writing. That is backward. The talking does not 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, do not 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 actually counts, which is the words themselves. That is what I will be doing, the same as almost every other day of the year.