I have written before about writing being a practice. You have to write every day. Don't tell people about the book you hope to write, sit down and write it. There is simply no other way to get there. For once, 'Just Do It' actually makes sense.
The problem, of course, is that no one has something to say every day. I believe that it does not matter how much you write, or how good it is, just get it down. The real work comes later, when you have enough of a narrative that you can begin to shape and polish it. Popular culture portrays writers as loners who slog through the days and years to produce a book or article, and while that can feel true, it does not capture the joy of writing.
The days I love best are the days when I wake up knowing what I am going to write. Since I write in the early morning, I can get my coffee and get started immediately--no delayed gratification here--and bring the vision I have in my head to life. Those are the days when writing is endowed with joy. I can write with a certainty that I do not always possess, and both tone and voice feel more natural. It is an almost magical experience, as if the words reveal themselves and I am just gathering them on the page. The biggest challenge on those days is that I have a real job and have to stop much sooner than I am ready. What is interesting is that returning to finish capturing the vision the next day can feel very daunting. I rarely have the same passion that I brought to the work the day before and it can feel like a chore to take that bit of narrative to its natural conclusion. It almost feels as if it was intended to be inscribed in a single sitting, and if I have to stretch it out over more days, I lose touch with my faith in the vision I am trying to capture. (Writer's Note: I could never go back to a finished project and point out which pieces of the narrative came easily, and which had to be cajoled into being. I don't think I can hold on to the experience that way.)
There is another kind of writing joy that is only apparent--to me, at least--after the fact. I have many more days when I sit down at my computer with no idea where the narrative is going to take me, and at the end of an hour or an hour and a half, I look back and see that I have written three or four pages. That is a significant amount of work for me. I'm thrilled if I can get three or four paragraphs out each morning, so when the words flow it is a delight. It is important to note that nothing ever comes out finished. Whether the words flow unconsciously, or I labor for hours over a single sentence, I will revise later.
Once I have a draft finished, that is when I can begin to understand the errors in the narrative arc. I will pull the book apart and put it back together differently. Characters that interact across the narrative will have every scene in which they are together arrayed back-to-back so I can check for consistency in tone and truth. (Writer's note: this is where you catch yourself repeating a character's back story multiple times or realizing you have the use the same slang saying more than one hundred times. You fix things and then put them back in their proper place.) I spend a considerable amount of time calendaring my novels, especially if events happen around holidays, or weddings or vacations, etc. If I want the events to unfold over six months, I need to make sure I write them across six months. And if I'm jumping from September to December, I must make that clear or the reader gets lost or loses touch with your characters' feelings and motivations.
Win a free Kindle edition of Love: a novel of grief and desire: I work with Reader's Favorite on the Kindle book giveaway. If you go to readersfavorite.com/book-giveaway you can sign up for the monthly giveaway. You can scroll through the list of giveaways (over 500 each month) or sort the list by title or author to find Love: a novel of grief and desire and put your name in for this month's drawing. Good luck!
Hi, Jefferson! Beth here. I write what I guess you would call literary criticism, and what you say here resonates for me, too. For me, though, it's not writing every day (though when I am heading for the finish line, yes), but engaging with a project or paper or chapter or presentation every day. Looking up something, reading other criticism, reading/re-reading the primary work, finding earlier notes, the list goes on and on. But somehow touching the work. I don't always succeed at the every day goal, either, but I feel it when I don't. And I have learned, like you, that it's the only thing that works, which makes getting back on the horse of habit easier now than…