5 Challenges to Writing Every Day

With my consecutive day writing streak approaching 700 days (687 as of yesterday), I thought I’d take a few moments to talk about the challenges of writing every day. There are many people who challenge the notion of writing every day, arguing that one should write only when one feels the urge. I write these posts as a window into my methods, but I understand that what I do may not work for anyone but me. That said, if someone sees my posts and thinks that they want to give it a try, here are some of the challenges I faced along the way, and how I dealt with them.

1. What do I write?

If, when you sit down to write each day, you struggle with what you want to write–that is, before putting a single word down on paper, you come up blank, then writing every day may prove challenging.

I have been lucky in this respect. I am a pantser when it comes to writing–I don’t plot out my stories ahead of time, but that does not mean I am don’t plan ahead. I am thinking about my stories constantly. By the time I sit down to write, I can start very quickly. The quality of what I write may vary from day-to-day, but rare is the day on which I struggle just to get started.

2. What about those days where I just don’t feel like writing?

I enjoy the act of writing. I like telling stories, too, but for me, writing is a kind of stress relief. Even so, there are days when I am tired, when I’ve worked at the day job for 10 hours with my head down in code, and come home only to take the kids to a Little League game or some other event. By the time I get to the keyboard, my mind is utterly exhausted. What then?

I also look at writing as practice. Like anything, to get better at it, you have to practice. If you play a musical instrument, you often practice even on those occasions when you don’t really feel like it, simply because you have to get the practice in. On those days where I just don’t feel like I have the energy, I tell myself that I have to get the practice in anyway. Even if I only sit there for ten minutes, I get a page. Even if that page is terrible, I learn something about my writing.

3. Writing every day requires discipline

There’s no way around this. If you are undisciplined, I suspect you will find writing every day to be challenge. Not impossible, but just a challenge. I will say that I have found that it gets easier over time. But especially at the beginning, it took me a lot of dogged discipline, especially on days when it seemed the writing wasn’t going well.

4. Writing every day requires persistence

If you miss a day, write it off, and be sure to write the very next day. It has happened to me. I mentioned at the outset that as of yesterday, I have written for 687 consecutive days. But I also have a larger “streak”: I have written 830 out of the last 832 days. In other words, I have missed two days of writing in the last 830 days. When I started out trying to write every day back in February 2013, I wrote for 140 consecutive days, and then circumstances arose which forced me to miss a day. I was back writing the next two days, and then I missed another day. But that day, July 21, 2013, was the last day that I missed.

It was hard to see a 140-day streak die, but I got right back to it. I took some important lessons from those two missed days, and so far, I have written every day since.

5. The weight of the streak can be stressful at first

I occasionally am asked if I feel the weight of the writing streak as the numbers build up. My answer is that I felt it early on, but I don’t any more.

Early on, while developing the discipline, I was learning how to work around my schedule. I was learning how to write in noisy environments, or in short 10-minute spurts here and there. But as the streak grew, I also felt nervous about what would happen if I missed a day. As I said above, at 140 days, I did miss a day.

In the nearly 700 days that I have not missed a day writing, I have experience just about every kind of contingency. There are days on which I have traveled, and needed to squeeze in the writing early. There are days that seemed filled from start to finish and I had to find 5 minutes to get a few paragraphs in. There are days that I felt sick, or that I was taking care of sick kids. There was even a day that I went under a general anesthetic (when my wisdom teeth were yanked) and I still managed to get some writing in.

In all of that time, I’ve learned that chances are very good that I’ll get the writing done. I have 687 days that demonstrate this. So the streak no longer weights on me the way it did early on. If anything, it demonstrated the certainty with which I will get my writing done each day.

Again, this is my mode of working, and it has worked very well for me. But every one is different, and we must each figure out what works best for ourselves. I present these challenges as lesson I have learned that may benefit others who are considering tyring to write every day. Hopefully, they help.