Like It’s Your Job

One of the best/ most useful bits of advice I’ve been given about writing is to treat it like it’s your job. Good advice but what does it mean.

It means showing up at the same place at the same time several days a week. For me that is 0330 at my writing desk Monday through Saturday. I write from 0330 to around 0600 six and sometimes seven days a week. That will look different for every person. The idea is to show up at the same place and time and get words on the page. Even, and especially, if it’s only ten or fifteen minutes each day.

It means that you don’t get to “not feel it”. When I was active duty in the Navy working as an aircraft mechanic I couldn’t walk up to my chief or my division officer and tell them I had mechanics block and just wasn’t feeling it. Well I could…then they would laugh and put me to work doing something that sucked until I began to “feel it.”

It means working at writing the way you would at any other craft. No one starts out writing great prose. It takes practice and training. Take a course, read a book or two, listen to a pod cast. Then get busy practicing. The more you write the better you’ll get.

That’s probably enough of me talking about writing. I’m new and newly published but this is one of those bits of advice that you can take to the bank as a new writer.

Hope this helps.