Write Every Day Part 1: My Story

Many writing gurus and successful authors talk about how important it is to write every day. But why is it so important? Should every writer do it? In this, the first of a series of blog posts, I share with you how my writing career (eventually ) led me to a daily writing routine, and with that to publishing success.

Why should you write every day?

Naturally, you don’t have to.  But if you want to be a writer, to make writing your profession, writing something every day is essential. 

I assume since you are here, you have the ambition to be a writer.  Whether you want to write a journal, a blog, an autobiography, a novel, or a nonfiction title, you need to commit to putting down some words at some point. Writing every day makes the process of achieving the desired word count easier.

MA in Creative Writing

When I first began taking writing seriously I enrolled on an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa. At first, I was delighted to be accepted, but soon I realized that the course meant that I had to actually start writing. I’d already completed a novel (a manuscript which will never see the day of light), but it had taken me years. Fair enough, I had young children at home, a full-time job as Financial Director, so writing time came at a premium. 

Instead of writing, I tended to do spurts of activity. But this had its pitfalls: every time I’d sit at my desk in front of my computer, I’d have to reread almost the entire manuscript, just to get into the story. And I’d begin editing instead of writing. Now, I often say that editing is also writing, but when you are in the first draft stage, this can be a killer. If you’d allocated, say, two hours to writing, editing what you’ve already written can swallow up the whole of that time.

I will go deeper into all these techniques on how to get fresh, new, words down every day, later on in this series of blog posts. But first, let’s go back to my own experience.  I didn’t learn the magic of writing every day until many, many years after I fished the exciting, roller-coaster year of my MSCW course.

Coffee and Vodka

No, this is not about a particularly lovely cocktail that got me writing every day. ;-)

During the year-long MA course, I wrote one novel, now titled COFFEE AND VODKA, which took another six months to edit after I’d got my Masters Degree. In those days, the wonder of self-publishing hadn’t taken off (this was in 2005), so I began querying with literary agents. I’d send a few letters and samples of my manuscript off each week. And each week, I’d get a bunch of rejection letters. This in itself wasn’t particularly conductive or motiving to start another novel, but start I did nevertheless. 

The Literary Agent

The second book was amazingly easy to write, even though I only wrote on weekends and evenings. This novel, THE RED KING OF HELSINKI, is a spy thriller, a genre I hadn’t imagined that I’d ever write. IN spite of this, I finished the manuscript in a matter of months. After my previous efforts, this was amazing to me. I also had more success with agents. I was even called to a meeting in London with a very esteemed one. This lady had been Doris Lessing’s agent, so I was thrilled to get some face-to-face time with her. The agent wanted me to do some rewrites. This request made me, for the first time in my short author career, force myself to write every day. 

The motivation of knowing that an agent was eagerly waiting for my work was enough for me to forgo TV, sleep, and outings with family. Long story short, the agent never took me on – she didn’t like the rewrite even though I’d followed her wishes to the ’t’. Oh, well, I think the book is a much better piece of work for the rewrite.

And the agent’s words of encouragement as I left her office still ring in my ears, ‘I’ll read your future work even if I have to pay good money to buy the books.’

Blogging

You can imagine that, in spite of her kind comment, my world crashed around me after that little episode. It wasn’t until a year or so later when I began blogging about my own life that I began writing in earnest again.

In those days, in 2009, blogging was ‘the thing’ and I soon discovered an online readership. When I moved my blog over to my website in 2012, I’d had half a million hits on the Blogger site. This community encouraged me to write a chapter of my story, titled ‘How I Came to Be in England’, every week.

Soon, it became apparent that, instead of a biography, I was writing a novel. Again, I was writing nearly every day. A few years later, in 2012, I published a rewritten version of these blog posts as ‘The Englishman’, now titled THE ENGLISH HEART.  This novel, and the subsequent series, is still one of my best-selling titles.

Self-publishing

Self-publishing, especially when readers are raving about your book, is in my view, one of the best motivators a writer can have. What could be better than being able to write and publish your work whenever you want? I went on to write five more books in ‘The Nordic Heart’ series, but I was still not writing regularly, let alone every day.

NaNoWriMo

It wasn’t until I took part in NaNoWrMo in 2014, that I began a proper writing routine. The National Writing Month is a program that happens each November where the participants undertake to write 50,000 words in a month. I’d been wanting to take part in this event for a while, but always backed out at the last minute. Finally, in 2014, I achieved my goal with a few days to spare. 

In order to write 50,000 in a month, you have to be disciplined and write every day. They say it takes three weeks to form a habit, and NaNoWriMo certainly worked for me. Now, if I have a day when I haven’t written anything, I get a bit jittery. I do try these days take breaks, but I’m at my happiest if I write every day, be it a blog post, newsletter, or adding words to my current manuscript. Even on holiday, I need to have one or two writing days.

Write Every Day

If you wish to become a career writer, you need to sell books to sustain your lifestyle. Without being a mathematician, or a marketing guru, it’s evident that the more (good quality) books you publish, the more sales you get per day. If readers fall in love with a book, they like to read more of the same author’s work.

I found this to be true when I began my blog series back in 2009 and published my first novel in 2012. I just wish that I’d taken heed of the ‘Write Every Day’ ethos back then and produced the subsequent novels a lot sooner than I did!

This is the reason I wanted to share my own experiences of how to establish a sustainable writing routine, which will bring you success.

Because I know, writing every day enables you to produce books as quickly as you possibly can.

That’s it.

That’s the long and short of it.

A little word of warning though. You do need to take breaks. Your brain needs to reset itself at some point. But, if you get into the habit of writing a few words – even just a few hundred – every day, it’s much easier to take breaks and get back to it again.

In the next post in this series, I’ll talk in more detail about why writing every day brings you success. My book, WRITE EVERY DAY, is now on preorder. You can find it here.

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