Your Writing Life Doesn’t Have to Look Like Anyone Else’s
I’m writing this on a winter morning, a Wednesday, which is my writing day. Until recently I didn’t have this day earmarked for anything in particular. It was only through natural trial and error, the experience of sending my son back to school after a pandemic year, and softening into our new family routines that I was able to see it: Wednesdays are typically free from meetings and appointments, which meant I could scoop it up for writing.
This is always the task—to remain adaptable and pay attention to the spaces where our work can thrive.
Maybe you don’t have a Wednesday. That’s OK. Your writing practice doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s, and that’s the beauty of this creative life we all get to design for ourselves.
This idea came to me in a sort of writing-adjacent way, by noticing a lot of people talking about their relationship with social media. Most industries in their own way, whether print, online, are trying to sell us something, which often leans on the messaging that something is wrong and needs fixing.
Shame, fear, comparison, you name it, all the things that make us turn outward instead of inward, convince us we need a raved-about new supplement with 2,000 5-star reviews to remedy whatever’s going on.
The writer’s life as its portrayed online isn’t quite that insidious, but social media still plays to our insecurities, no matter how much we’d like to think otherwise. That’s why when we read a post about a writer who wakes up at 5 a.m. every day to write before her kids wake up, we wonder if we’re being lazy. (We’re not.)
If an early wake up time works for you, go for it. But we have to make our own rules.
We should also remember that new habits take time to shift, and not everything will work (or work right now). A sustainable creative life is a process of trial and error, checking in, shifting something, seeing what works, trying something new.
It’s highly unlikely that the writing routine you have today will be the same one you have a year from now. That’s because life always shifts and circumstances change.
Here are a few suggestions I’ve gathered from other writers:
Katherine May has talked about how she writes for three weeks, then takes a week off.
On this podcast episode, poet Maggie Smith talks about writing in the margins of her life as a full-time mom. “You can be making dinner, stirring the soup, getting something ready, putting the soccer jersey from the washer in the dryer, and if one little idea comes to you, you write it down. Then another little idea comes to you. You write it down. It's worked for me.”
I once heard Cheryl Strayed discuss being a binge writer, where she just locks herself in a hotel room for days to work on a draft.
On Instagram, Sara Grunder Ruiz pulled back the curtain on her writing process in the weeks leading up to her novel’s publication last fall, and it involved a lot of early mornings writing before the kids got up before heading to her job teaching college composition classes. (Her debut novel, Love, Lists, and Fancy Ships is both fun and heartfelt.)
A writing practice is constantly in motion.
For example, last year I did NaNoWriMo in November, skipped December and January, picked things back up in February, wrote furiously through July, took most of August and September off, then put Wednesday as my writing day on the calendar before the holidays arrived.
So while there might be a stretch of time that you get up early or stay up late, or reward yourself for a writing session well done, most of the time, the practices we embody shift like the seasons. They serve us for a time, then we need something else, and maybe they serve us again later. With this cyclical creative energy, I tend to believe the best course of action is to make a habit of evaluating our habits, rather than clinging to ones that might not be serving us anymore.
It's one of the best ways I know to make progress.
