You Don't Have to Write Every Day to "Be A Writer"

aka, Building a Writing Habit While Living with Limitations

a version of this was originally published in Poets & Writers Magazine

To “be a writer” is to spend time writing—along with reading, observing, and finding novel ways to color-catalogue one’s books—but traditional rules about what’s required of writers often assume able-bodied, neurotypical individuals without caretaking responsibilities. Stephen King’s iconic On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000) is one popular source of these rules: “The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate—four to six hours a day, every day,” writes King without a hint of irony, “will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.” According to King, the only things that could possibly prevent one from taking his prescription would be disinterest or a lack of talent.

Had I never read On Writing, I likely would have still picked up on the long-familiar baseline assumption that writers, if they’re to be taken seriously, will be sure to write daily. After all, my Advanced Writing professor in college had us physically submit a document that stated the exact time of day we’d commit to writing, without fail, every single day of the week. And for years I followed King’s advice without knowing it, spending long days at my laptop for seven to eight hours at a time while I worked on my first book.

But in the years immediately following the publication of On Writing, I spoke to mothers who felt that the exhortation to write daily, for hours at a time, or else! was unrealistic. These were mothers who were also successful writers—people who had discovered that with the unequal parenting responsibilities so often assigned to women, it simply was not possible to write every day while attending to their children and covering their own basic needs. They found it discouraging that their daily realities were being ignored; they were bothered that the people who disagreed with King and the advice of proselytizers like him were so often women.

Nor do these rules properly account for those with limitations such as chronic illness and disability, which can make adherence to daily, lengthy writing sessions physically and/or mentally impossible. After becoming ill in 2012 and diagnosed with a handful of chronic long-term ailments, I found that though I wasn’t a mother, I, too, could no longer write every day the way I once had. For one, I was incapable of remaining upright much of the time, making my epic laptop marathons a long-ago dream. “Bad days” and illness flares meant that I couldn’t write three sentences, let alone three thousand words, on some days.

Despite the challenges of these and other limitations, it remains possible to build a robust writing practice. While creating the curriculum for The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy, my online writing school for memoir writers living with limitations, I realized that in addition to discussing and learning about ethics and writing, writing about trauma, organizing research, and so forth, my students truly wanted to learn how to be writers when a regular writing habit is out of reach. I’ve since taken my own strategies and distilled them to a handful of elements.

The Productivity Equation is what I call the backbone. With this tool, you can consider your limitations, assess resources, and look at what you need to do to reach your goals—thereby building a writing practice in the process.

First, assess your limitations. What are your limitations? How do your limitations impact your life? Jot down the answers to these questions. Time is a limitation that we all have, so next, ask yourself: How are you spending your time? To answer this question, I suggest using a worksheet—try searching online for “daily planner PDF”—that measures time by half-hour increments. Fill out the worksheet for a few days, based on what you’re doing at any given moment. Having this as a record will be an important data point in your research. And because one of the most challenging things about living with limitations while trying to get things done is how unpredictable our bodies and minds can be, it’s useful to use a planner to write down what you are able to do when you are doing it. Writing these things down helps to give me data points that I can use in the future. I’ve learned, for example, that I can usually do about two events in a day. (An event, for me, can be anything from a brief phone call to a public reading or a shared meal.) I’ve also learned that I need an hour, or at least half an hour, of buffer time to lie down and rest between events. And I use a color-coded system in my monthly spread to note the exceptionally tough days and the exceptionally strong ones. There isn’t always a pattern to these things, but when there is, such as feeling more fatigued right around the start of my period, it’s good to note what they are.

To plan how to travel toward your goals, you need to know precisely the direction in which you’re headed. Create a list of goals that you control (i.e., “submitting ten stories this year,” not “winning the Nobel Prize in Literature”). Next to each goal, write down the Desired Objective, a concept that I learned from content creator and brand content strategy consultant Chase Reeves. A Desired Objective (DO) is a useful tool that reminds you what you’re trying to achieve by reaching this goal. For “submitting ten stories this year,” the DO is to “build a collection of short fiction.” If the goal were “journaling every morning,” the DO might be “get in the habit of getting out all of my thoughts, no matter how silly.”

Time is one important resource for writers, but it’s far from the only one that matters. Though your resources will vary depending on your limitations (including, at times, marginalized identities), you may also be able to access additional resources to bolster your position.

For example, what are your resources for chronic illness and disability? For mental illness? Create a list of categorized resources—the more specific, the better. Some examples include: Do you have someone who can babysit for you? Do you have a small budget for food that can be delivered? Do you have a compost heap, and can you trade mulch for dog-walking help? This list will grow and change as you acquire more resources and learn to target them to the limitations that match.

With a cache of resources at hand, you’ll realize that you don’t always need to increase your writing hours to be more productive. A writing practice works when you accumulate words brick by brick, whether those words come daily or not. Consider leveraging the time and energy you have to allow for more writing in your life, using various resource-based strategies. If your resource is relationships, barter with loved ones for help. If your resource is money, hire an expert to handle the tasks you’d otherwise handle. If your resource is community, see what communities, online and off, can offer support and advice. We may all technically have the same hours as Beyoncé, as the popular saying goes, but it’s Beyoncé’s resource inventory that allows her to do all that she does. Your resource inventory will do the same. By looking at the ways in which you can acquire more time, you can hopefully see the spaces in your hour-by-hour weekly planner that might be good places to create a writing practice.

Now that you’ve assessed your goals and inventoried your resources, you can use your creativity to design workarounds for the limitations that remain. One of my favorite workarounds has been learning to write on my phone. Because dysautonomia makes sitting difficult, I spend a lot of my time writing while lying on my side and holding my phone in one hand; the other hand taps out the words with my index finger. Most of The Collected Schizophrenias was written this way. Other writers who deal with wrist pain or arthritis use dictation and transcription to write. Another workaround I’ve chosen is to decrease the target word count for any given day of writing. Though 3,000 words in a day seemed normal to me at one time, I now give myself the goal of 200 or 300. Should I be unable to do that before I solidly hit a limitation and can’t go any further, I don’t attack myself with recriminations or berate myself for being “lazy.” I simply acknowledge that I’ve tried my best and will try again.

Once you’ve developed your own workarounds, you may, as I do, delight in learning about the workarounds of others. The bestselling author of Seabiscuit, Lauren Hillenbrand, who lives with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), also works from bed. Interviews that journalists normally conduct in person, she does with her phone. I also loved following along with friend and writer Suleika Jaouad’s creative process as she began to journal and paint watercolors from her bed in an oncology ward.

Using the Productivity Equation, you can create new space for a writing practice where before you may have felt overwhelmed by your limitations. I’ve spoken at length about these techniques with Grace Quantock, a disabled Welsh psychotherapist who lives with multiple chronic illnesses. Her own suggestion is to try what she calls Option 2. Option 1, she says, is pushing to try and “fix” your day by making your brain and body behave. Option 2 is “[doing] it now, [getting] on with things as best you can today—accepting that the work won’t be as good as you’d like” and “knowing that everything is about eleventytrillion times harder like this.” I love her concept of Option 2 because it’s both aspirational and realistic. It doesn’t try to bully anyone into doing their work by asserting that if we only loved it enough, we’d make time. You can create a writing practice that works for you with the right mindset and strategies. Remember: It’s not about writing every single day, but about being committed. Start small, keep going, and celebrate your progress along the way.