On Writing Every Day for Five Months

I am two weeks away from having written every day for five months. Which of the writing advice that I’d gotten during this time seems like it had staying power? Which aspects of writing got easier? Time to reflect on what was evergreen.

On Saving Energy:

This ended up being very important. If you are writing every day for five months, there will be many days when you are thinking about other things, doing other things, or otherwise can’t really write. I think that weirdly it was easier to write when I myself was sick, than when someone I really cared about wasn’t doing well and my attention was on helping them or otherwise keeping life things more stable while I was distracted with caring about them.

And so there were a few techniques for saving energy that I relied on.

• Just write it down, without editing it in your brain.

  • If writing is “saying something” then editing it right after you’d already said it means doing a lot more extra work.

  • If you are writing every day, regardless of other things you are doing, “saving energy” writing is important, and spending too many cycles just to say the same thing you wanted to say the first time means a lot of energy is spent.

• Write about what you are already thinking about.

  • This way you do not have to have another process of “coming up with ideas.” You can have a process like this and it can help, but if you are not inclined to maintain a list of ideas because you feel “saturated” in some way, then the process of writing to “clear” the saturated feeling is a perfectly good use

    • If you don’t like what you are thinking about, think about other things

On some days when I didn’t feel like writing anything, it was because I was overwhelmed with some information I wanted to think about or some feelings I wanted to process. One of my favorite things about having written every day was the feeling of surprise at how many things would not have been written ever because I did not want to write. Actually being forced to just write down what I was thinking about that day, because I owed a blogpost that day, mean that the most interesting thing for me that day ended up getting written down.

Perhaps there was some mild dishonesty here and there about what was “most interesting” in that I did not have an explicit goal of writing every day what was the most authentically interesting thing that day. It did not occur to me to keep this as a practice, until now, when I am writing this. And so whatever dishonesty occurred there was as a skill issue.

For example, today I am writing about writing. I am not writing about the shame of drinking, or about the woman with the sparkly brain that I hung out with this weekend, who wrote a book I like, and I like her a lot and her sparkly brain. But also I was not thinking about these things all day today. I could have been thinking about these things if I pushed myself, but I was thinking about this presentation I have to give about writing.

To be Continued in Part 2!