Writing every single day.. 

My oh my that is the thing you hear from every blog post from every youtube video from every Tik Tok video and the few tweets that pop up when your scroll through Twitter instead of writing. Now if you’re not a writer then you don’t hear these things but if you are a writer then writers always manage to pop up on socials all around you it kinda just happens. Maybe because we all depressed writers and it’s some sort of magnet or maybe our phones do listen to us and just send writers our way but either way as a writer you always hear that advice. 

My writing career or the time I realized that I wanted to be a writer and that was my dream I started writing a book. I wrote a first draft of a book in grade ten/ grade 11 and I think twelve. The best part about writing in grade twelve was I had a spare during the first period so I would end up going to the library and just writing and I ended up writing and finishing the first draft in 2 / 3 months. Sometimes friends would skip class or come and visit so I got distracted from actually writing. 

I know you’re reading this and probably confused as to where I’m going with this I promise there is a point to this whole thing I just take a few hours to get there. 

But anyways for the most part in grade twelve, I wrote every single day. Looking back was it good writing? No, it was actually really bad but I was writing and I was making a story and this was the first book to give a foundation later on. 

So now years later well being in 2023 I haven’t done that much writing. The last time I did a lot of writing was back in November 2022 when I was partaking in the Nanowrimo challenge which meant writing every single day for the month and at the end reaching 50k words. I completed it by the 27th and ended up writing 53k words and the book coming to 70k words. 

I remember doing the challenge and by the end, I was burnt out. I hated writing. I hate the story. I never ever wanted to be a writer again. However even near the end of writing and being exhausted by writing I was no longer staring at the screen not knowing what to type. All I knew those days was that I had to write and I did and somehow the words just came and made a story. So where am I going with this you’ll see. 

So its now March and I have been telling myself that I want to get back into writing since I have all these writing ideas but never give myself any time to write. Then I remembered watching a Tik Tok of Ed Sheeran during an interview and the person asked him if he ever gets writer’s block and if so how does he cope and I remember his saying. “Well you see I never get writer’s block because I write every single day the word just flows but if I do get writer’s block it’s because I stopped writing for some time and the flow was gone and I had to get back into it” Well he said something like that. 

I remember watching the video and for some reason, it stuck with me. Then I remembered finally re-reading the story I wrote during Nanowrimo to see how it was and seeing if it would need another rewrite since it was already my third draft and I really hated the story. 

The first ten chapters were rough but that was before I  nanomowri. I remember each chapter took me months to complete but I just couldn’t get myself into writing and it really showed in my work because it was stiff, it wasn’t smooth and it didn’t flow the way I wanted to. Then chapter 11 or somewhere near that is when I started the nanowrimo challenge and once again it was still kinda rocky and rough and everything that should have been smooth was like driving down a really rocky road. 

Then I got more chapters into the book which would have been the middle of Nanowrimo and all of a sudden the book went from being eh this is absolute crap to wow this is actually pretty good. Then it got better and well better. Now, of course, it still needed some edits and fixing up to do but the chapters no longer felt stiff the chapters were smooth and the writing was great. Even near the end when I started to get burned out it was still a great piece of writing. 

So I thought about how well that book turned out and I kept thinking about the interview with Ed Sheran and I had the realization that he was right and a lot of people were right well duh. As much as writing every single day sounded daunting once I got myself into writing and some sort of plan I was no longer staring at the screen trying to figure out what to say next I didn’t have writer’s block anymore. Writing every day just made the words flow and made a story that I knew I could fix later. 

That’s another quote that is always thrown about the writing community and it’s that writing can always be fixed but you can’t fix anything if there is nothing at all. The quote is way smoother than that but I forgot it now. 

If someone was to read the very first draft which was a short story only of 2,500 words and then read the second and then the third the first was absolute trash. But I learned the character’s voice and their quirks the seconded well it went from 2.500 words to a 23-chapter book that had way more details and a great foundation and then in the third draft I had the voice I had the quirks I had the world I had the story and I wrote it and I came to a new universe.  

Like I said writing every day sounds daunting and it really is but then you kinda just get used to that routine and it just becomes a day-to-day thing. Now if you ever get burnt out or just need a break then don’t write give yourself a day not to stress about having to write today because you have a headache and all you wanna do is sulk. 

As for right now writing every day I have had some problems stopping me but this is what I am trying to follow. 

I am not going to write 1.6k words like I did NaNoWriMo because it was exhausting and I was literally burnt out. Since Im starting with it I’m only doing five hundred words then possibly later on I’ll move to 1k words. The other thing is the thing I will write will most definitely be trash and I will have to rewrite it again and when I do it won’t be as trashy as the last. Then repeat and repeat again…