Filling the Well
The best advice that I can give to another writer.
Enough about me and who I am and what this blog is about. Let’s get down to brass tacks: this is the best piece of advice that I can offer to other writers. If I was interested in making a clickbait title on this blog entry, I’d probably make it: Do these two things and you’ll be a better writer.
Of course, it isn’t as simple as that. As I pointed out in my previous post, I can only describe techniques that work for me and I have no guarantee that any of these will work for you. To each piece of advice on this blog, you might as well add a big “for me” at the end of each one.
In other words, your mileage may vary. No refunds.
Alright, enough stalling. My first piece of writing advice is: exercise and reading.
Before you close this blog without reading another word after feeling Great Big Judgement, let me explain something: if you want to get better or feel more like doing something in general, you have to surround yourself with that thing. What helps a person get better at anything is pattern recognition. You see a particular pattern around you, and it helps you to understand what is working (or not working) in your own work.
It is also important to note that the enjoyment of the work you are ingesting is almost as important as the simple act of ingestion. You could read fifty books of absolute crap, and if you hated every minute of it, you’d have learned nothing1. Please, please read books you enjoy. I once had a writer friend of mine tell me that they were having the hardest time writing their book. I asked them what they were reading and they said they were having a hard time reading because their in-progress books kept triggering them. Why were they reading those books? Because the books were Literature which tackled similar subjects to my friend’s writing, which happened to be about familial abuse and generational trauma. In other words, they were reading books that they thought would teach them how to write the story they wanted to write, instead of reading the books they enjoyed.
Don’t do it! Don’t just read ‘serious’ literature in the hopes it will make you a ‘serious’ writer. Life is too short. Read and write the things you enjoy.
Exercise, on the other hand, just makes you feel better in general, so it makes you more likely to want to do the things that you already want to do, including writing. Obviously, this doesn’t work for folks who can’t workout due to disability or injury, but another way of putting it is try to figure out a way of getting out of your own head.
About a year into Covid, I was writing my first book. This was before I was medicated for the depression I knew I’d had my whole life. Each day, I would obsess about how to start the next page of my book. I would read the last sentence and for the next day I would run it over and over again in my head2 until it was as smooth as a river stone and I could write the following page. After I became medicated, I found this type of repetitive obsession much harder to do. The only real way I could get myself there was by walking for about twenty to thirty minutes, until my brain was quiet enough that I could figure out what had to come next.
Prescribing a hard limit of how many words you should put down on a page every day I find to be an exercise in futility. Occasionally, I’ll be able to get my 300 words in as Auntie Anne Lamott wants, or my 2000 words as Daddy Stephen King prescribes, but I’m not trying to just get words down. I’m trying to build a world or tell a story that the people I love will enjoy.
I like listening to other writers morning routines as much as anyone else, but at the end of the day I’ve never been able to find anything that works. It all seems too rigid and prescribed and I’ve never been able to maintain something like that long term.
It is as simple as this: I know when I am doing well in writing because I feel like writing more and therefore I am writing more. The only times that I’ve been able to consistently get my ass in the chair is by doing some sort of exercise which pulls the signal from the noise and allows me to understand what must happen next. And the only way for me to feel like I have enough inside me to pull from is by reading enough.
“Fine, Z,” I hear you say, “But you need to give me hard numbers. What is actually enough time that I have to read and exercise per day to reap the benefits?”
That’s a big old shrug from me, bud. Probably about twenty minutes of exercise and about twenty to thirty pages of reading. More if you are more physically fit than my fat ass, or less if you’re not. However long it takes to quiet it all down.
When you are writing, how much should you write a day?
As much as you can without burning yourself out. As I alluded to earlier, I will frequently only write about 300 words a day, as that is about a page and for me writing is about the marathon and not the sprint.
There have definitely been days (at the end of NaNoWriMo or trying to meet an arbitrary deadline that I’ve set for myself) where I have forced myself to continue writing far beyond what I normally write. I once wrote thirty or forty pages in the span of two days and there was a short story that I wrote from beginning to end in about twelve hours, after reading Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges and a collection by Anton Chekhov for the first time. But it will always burn me out. It feels as though I give myself permission to not work as hard after I have pushed myself particularly hard.
I don’t really believe in hustle culture, so this is the one time I will say anything close to “rise and grind” or I don’t want anything to interfere with my ability to write day after day. Writing is good for my mental health, it’s good for me to do it everyday, and if I wrote an entire book in a month and then took six months off to recover, I’d feel worse than if I’d never written the book in the first place.
That’s it. That’s my advice. Let me know if it works for you, or doesn’t, and if you have any other tips to make me productive, please let me know in the comments below. I’m always looking for that secret tip that will make me a millionaire with absolutely no work.
Which is not to say that poorly written books or books you don’t enjoy reading teach you nothing. Sometimes they can be the most effective teachers in showing you what not to do.
By the way, if you are doing this, it’s called rumination and you should probably look into antidepressants. Legal note that I am not a doctor.