What if everything you believed about women and writing was wrong?
The truth about those motivational articles and books that say you can find inspiration anytime and anywhere: They lie. They are written by a collective of cranky motivational “experts” who have devised ways to keep the rest of us in perpetual uncertainty, frustration, discontent, and torture.
I think they meet every Thursday at noon.
And they wear berets
If you want to be a writer you have to show up, sit down, and write. Words may be dictated to you by God as they were for Giacomo Puccini when he wrote the opera Madame Butterfly, but then it’s up to you to do the menial work of getting them down on paper, because you’re just the designated typist. That job involves a lot of hard, laborious, meticulous work that takes dedication and persistence. When it comes right down to it, writing is just a job, and like any other job you have to work at it. Okay, and it’s the only thing that makes you happy.
Writers like to tell other writers to trust the process. Show up, sit down and write, and trust that something good is emerging.
But how do you trust the process? It’s simple. You need a plan that guides your writing:
Pick a place to write in every day
Pick a time to write every day
Pick an amount of time to write every day
That’s it. It could be your favorite coffee shop at 7 a.m. for 30 minutes or your lunch hour. It could be your armchair in your living room at 7 p.m. Do that every day—or at least more days than not—and you’ll find the process is working.
Make it a habit to read work that matches roughly what you hope to write and publish. Read the kind of books you’d like to write, the poems you’d like to write, the articles you’d like to write for magazines. Make it as important as anything else you schedule in your day, and never allow busyness to crowd out the time you devote to consuming other good works.
Mary Gordon said, “A writer uses a journal to try out the new step in front of the mirror.”
Are you trying out new steps? A new dance? Writing in a journal is the place to experiment. To develop our talent further.
Today, try out a few steps in front of the mirror.
Just in case nobody every told you, here is some information worth sharing, remembering, celebrating:
The first modern novel every published, The tale of Genji, was written by a Japanese noble woman named Murasaki Shikibu, early in the 11th century.
The best-selling novelist of all time was Dame Barbara Cartland who, before her death in 2000, published 723 novels.
The record for the fastest selling book of all time belongs to JK Rowling, for the seventh and final book of the Harry Potter series, which sold 11 million copies in 24 hours.
Here’s a little ray of writing sunshine: It’s easy to assume absolutely, finitely, without question that writing everyday leads to a productive writing career.
To be clear, for some people it does.
But contrary to the common advice that writing every day is essential to being a writer, “no particular work schedule is associated with high productivity. Even working on a regular basis yields a mixed pattern of results” (as cited in Kellogg, 1994, p. 194).
Further research is needed to investigate the question of whether the advice to write every day is sound advice or if it is just a fallacious argument that we think is true because so many say it is.
