{"id":6955,"date":"2022-09-26T12:09:48","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T16:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=6955"},"modified":"2022-09-27T12:12:20","modified_gmt":"2022-09-27T16:12:20","slug":"should-you-write-every-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/should-you-write-every-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Should You Write Every Day?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

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Lots of authors worry about the number of words they write per day. Some even post the tally on social media as if they\u2019re in some kind of competition.

And if they\u2019re not writing at least 500 or 1200 or 2000 words or whatever quota they\u2019ve set, they feel miserable. Why aren\u2019t they working harder? Why are they stuck? What\u2019s wrong with them? How come everyone else is racking up the pages?

If that kind of system works for you, fine. But as an author, editor, and writing teacher, I think it can be oppressive.\u00a0 Too many writers believe that if they\u2019re not actually physically writing a set number of words every single day, they\u2019re not just slacking, they\u2019re falling behind and even betraying their talent. Especially when they read online about other people\u2019s booming word counts.

How do they get caught in that kind of dead-end thinking? It\u2019s thanks to the endless blogs and books urging writers who want to publish and stay published to write every day.\u00a0 They make that sound not just doable, but the norm. Some days, though, it\u2019s simply not possible. Hell, for some writers it\u2019s never possible. And why should it be?<\/em>

I never urge my creative writing workshop students to write every day; I’ve suggested they try to find the system that works for them. I\u2019ve also never worried myself about how much I write every day because I\u2019m almost always writing in my head, and that\u2019s as important as putting things down on a page.

But aside from that, every book, every project has its own unique rhythm. While working on my 25th book, a suspense novel, I found the last chapter blossoming in my head one morning while I was on the treadmill at the gym. Though I sketched its scenes out when I got home, I spent weeks actually writing it.

Some people would call that obsessing. They\u2019d be wrong. What I did was musing, rewriting, stepping back, carefully putting tiles into a mosaic, as it were, making sure everything fit right before I went ahead, because this was a crucial chapter. I was also doing some major fact-checking, too, because guns were involved and I had to consult experts as well as spend some time at a gun range. It took days before I even had a workable outline and then a rough draft of ten pages, yet there were times when I had written ten pages in a single day on the same book.

The chapter was the book\u2019s most important one, where the protagonist and his pursuer face off, and it had to be as close to perfect as I could make it. So when I re-worked a few lines that had been giving me trouble and found that they finally flowed, it made me very happy. I was done for the day!

And if I didn\u2019t write a word on any given day or days, I knew I would be, soon enough. Because the book was always writing itself in my head, whether I met some magical daily quota or not.<\/p>\r\n

I don\u2019t count how many words or pages I write a day, I focus on whether what I\u2019ve written is good, or even if it has potential with revisions. That\u2019s enough for me.

Lev Raphael has taught creative writing at Michigan State University.\u00a0 He’s the prize-winning author of 27 books in many genres and has also published hundreds of stories, essays, book reviews and blogs.\u00a0 He <\/strong>edits and coaches writers at writewithoutborders.com<\/a>.<\/strong>

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Image by StockSnap at Pixabay<\/em><\/p>\r\n

 <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lots of authors worry about the number of words they write per day. Some even post the tally on social media as if they\u2019re in some kind of competition. And if they\u2019re not writing at least 500 or 1200 or 2000 words or whatever quota they\u2019ve set, they feel miserable. Why aren\u2019t they working harder? … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[298,95,296,830,321,197,19,82,501,380,1219,495,337,1577,2648,765],"class_list":["post-6955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-advice-for-writers","tag-creative-writing-2","tag-editing","tag-essays","tag-fiction","tag-mysteries","tag-novels","tag-teaching-writing","tag-thrillers","tag-writers","tag-writewithoutborders-com","tag-writing","tag-writing-advice","tag-writing-every-day","tag-writing-plans","tag-writing-schedule"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6955"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6965,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6955\/revisions\/6965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}