(and why you don’t need to do it)
We’ve all heard the stories. We know the mantra. Write every day. Whether you want to or not. The muse might be dancing on the rooftops or hunkered down in a dark hole, it makes no difference. Just write.
Stephen King writes 2,000 words a day, even on his birthday and Christmas. Maya Angelou famously wrote in her hotel room-turned-office every day from 7 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon. There’s wisdom in this. In having a routine and pressing on, regardless of how one feels about the work or themselves or the world.
It’s hard to persist in hard things. To keep working at something that’s frustrating, and there’s much to be gained from showing up and sitting down, day in and day out, come hell or high water, and just. doing. the work.
I’m a better writer for the times I’ve made a schedule and stuck to it. But I’m also a better writer for the days I don’t. For the days when I take a break. There are seasons when I’m pushing hard, pressing into a project and the fire of my creativity is all consuming. There’s an energy to it that’s palpable and expansive and a little wild.
But projects end. Things are published or put in a drawer and inevitably I feel a little tired. The fire burns itself out. This used to worry me. I’d fret over what I’d work on next and what if I didn’t have any more ideas and should I just write for the sake of writing? For the sake of sitting down at the same time and getting something, anything down on paper?
Breaks are good. Flames dwindle but the coals of my own labor can keep me warm for a really, really long time. Fields that are allowed to go fallow produce better food. So whether I’m focused on writingwritingwritingwriting, or taking a break from that frenzied pace, both are “the writing life,” because the writing life is more than writing. When I’m making breakfast or driving my son to the skatepark or helping my mom get her prescriptions filled, that’s the writing life. When I sit up late at night after everyone in the house is asleep and sketch character arcs through the sky of my imagination, that’s the writing life. When I flew down to California every month and walked with my dad through the end stages of Alzheimer’s, that was the writing life.
Do I write every day? Sometimes. More often than not, in fact. But sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I take long breaks and see what might germinate in the soil of a more quieted mind. Because I know that whatever it is I do with my days, if I’m attentive to the tasks before me and curious about them, then every part of my life, whether mundane or miraculous, is part of my life as a writer.
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Nancy Myers Rust is a writer, teacher and editor living in Seattle with her husband, two kids, and two dogs. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University and writes most often at the intersections of culture, race, gender, and faith. Her work has been featured in print and online in various places, including Pangyrus, Radix, Relief, Fathom, and Literary Mama.