Why Novice Writers Need to Write Every Day

There is a lot of advice about how to write on this website. A lot. When I first started treating writing on Medium as a serious enterprise, the sheer volume of it stressed me out. There was Anthony Moore telling me to write every day and just do the work; and Shannon Ashley telling me to be vulnerable; and Niklas Göke telling me to write stories instead of writing self-help; and Shaunta Grimes telling me to format and position my work correctly; and dozens of other people with invaluable advice waiting to help me.

Eager to succeed, I tried to implement everyone’s advice all at once. I published as often as possible, shared vulnerable stories, and did my best to edit — but no matter how much work I put in, it was clear to me that my work was not as good as that of the pros.

I wanted to lean back in my chair and drown in self-pity, but I couldn’t even do that. After all, I knew why my stories weren’t good enough. I simply wasn’t putting in the level of work the pros were.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. I wanted to spend 10+ hours creating blockbuster stories, but I just couldn’t seem to do it. After an hour or two of working on the same story, I simply ran out of things to improve about it.

I began to beat myself up. If Stephen King’s work requires five times as much editing as it does writing, then surely mine requires twenty times the editing. I knew it did. But for some reason, I couldn’t do it. I was willing to work ten hours, I wanted to, but I couldn’t find ten hours of work to do. No matter how hard I tried, it just didn’t seem to come.

Like any other craftsman, a good writer operates not by conscious thought but by habituated behavior. A writer with some experience has a treasure trove of habits they fall back on. The process of performing a pre-writing ritual (if the writer has one) — sitting down at the computer, opening their document, writing, coming up with a headline and subtitle, formatting, finding an appropriate image, tagging/optimizing a story for search engines, submitting pitches to publications and magazines, and hitting publish — is all performed out of habit. If they’re a highly-skilled writer, the writing process itself is stacked with habits, like arranging ideas in a particular order, including and framing personal anecdotes, and searching their commonplace book and library for relevant quotations.

The new writer, on the other hand, has none of these habits. When they sit down at their computer, they need to figure out for the first time how to open their word processor, how to use their word processor’s interface, how to come up with a headline, how to optimize for search engines, how to select appropriate header images, etc. It’s no wonder beginners don’t write great stories at first. They’re dealing with a lot more cognitive overhead.

This is to say nothing of the emotional drama of writing. Skilled writers have some coping mechanisms in place for dealing with criticism, overcoming insecurity, and appropriately motivating themselves. New writers, on the other hand, are learning how to deal with all these emotions for the first time.

When we’re discussing a physical skill like football, the problem of cognitive overhead occurs to most people intuitively. We all know knowing a lot about football doesn’t mean you can play football well.

When it comes to skills of the mind, however, like painting or writing, we act like we should be able to will ourselves to mastery overnight. After all, it’s not as if painting or writing requires a trained physical ability. They’re just using their hands, same as we do when we write or type. So why can’t we do what they do?!

As someone who draws and paints for leisure, I’m familiar with this problem. You look at what you want to draw and think you see it clearly, but when your brain tells your hands what to draw, what comes out looking demented and not at all like what you’re seeing. If you spend any amount of time considering this feeling, it starts to drive you crazy. You’re looking at a tree, you know you’re looking at a tree, but what you draw looks nothing like a tree.

On more than one occasion, I have sat down with the intention to work on one painting for as long as it takes to make it photorealistic. But without fail, I always reached a point where, despite the fact that my painting fell far short of photorealism, I simply could add no more to it. I just couldn’t do it. There was nothing left in me.

The only way for an artist to overcome this is to start a new drawing. And when you reach that magical, mysterious point when the drawing is done, start another. And another, and another.

Until one day you sit down to draw something years later and realize, breathless, you’ve finally drawn what you meant to draw.

So I said “fuck it.” If my stories were going to fall short, they were going to fall short. If sheer volume of practice was the only thing separating me from the quality I was looking for, then by god I would produce that volume. Hard work is the great equalizer. I kept publishing sub-par stories that I worked on for about half an hour each, three or four a week. Most of them tumbled into the void mere moments after hitting publish.

I didn’t ask for much feedback, because I knew they were falling short, but people offered it anyway: “Your stories aren’t very good.” “Your stories sound preachy.” “You’re not very vulnerable.”

Great, I thought. Guess I need to keep practicing.

About two years have passed since I made that decision. What difference has it made?

Well, my stories got better. A lot better. For the first year, they got better purely because I wrote story after story. I spent a solid year just learning how to write story after story without losing my mind. Each time, my production time was a little faster and my story a little better. I was learning the habits of writing.

It was only after this first year spent habituating myself to writing that I was ready to move on to advanced writing skills like reading craft books, considering sentence and paragraph flow, and learning not to end sentences on prepositions.

I’m not the only writer who’s had this experience. When you look at successful writers, both on Medium and in ‘the real world’, you see that most of their early work sucked. Not only because they were inexperienced writers, but also because they didn’t put in the work.

David Foster Wallace remarks on this in an interview with David Lipsky, comparing his first novel Broom of the System to his latest at the time, Infinite Jest:

I’m proud of (Infinite Jest). In a way that for instance I’m not proud of Broom of the System. Which I think shows some talent, but was in many ways a fuck-off enterprise. It was written very quickly, rewritten sloppily, sound editorial suggestions were met with a seventeen-page letter about literary theory that was… really a way for me to avoid doing hard work. And (with Infinite Jest) I just, I didn’t fuck off on this, you know? I mean, this is absolutely the best I could do.

David Lipsky, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

So, if you’re a new writer and people around you are telling you to edit thirty-seven times and to come up with 286 headlines and to kill your darlings and to spend 10+ hours on every single story, don’t stress about it. If all you can manage is to type incoherently for 37 minutes, come up with one-and-a-half headlines, and you have to close your eyes before hitting “Publish” and right after run away, that’s fine. If you do this every day, sooner or later you will find it is a lot easier. You will find yourself writing for more than 37 minutes, and you will find yourself spontaneously coming up with more headlines. You will find you no longer have to close your eyes when you hit “Publish,” and you will no longer need a stiff drink right after. When all that becomes easy and perhaps a bit routine, then you can worry about the rest.

What’s important is that you sit down every day and do the work. The rest will take care of itself.