How do you become a writer? Ray Bradbury (if you don't know who he is go just... castrate yourself or something; really, you probably deserve it) had a simple response. His guide to writing was completely self-contained. There was no way you could follow his advice to the letter and not improve somewhat.
Universe at Large: How do you become a writer?
Bradburry: Write every day for a year.
Heinlein had five rules to writing speculative fiction, a fraction of which are applicable here. I'll list the first three.
- You must write.
- You must finish what you write.
- You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
I do my best to write every day but this isn't always feasible. I have a job that keeps me from when I wake up until six in the evening, which requires a half-hour commute. I have a significant other. I have a cat. I have an apartment that needs cleaning, frequently. Books to read, games to play, friends to see. Moreover, I have a 10pm bedtime. Call me spoiled in that last bit of trivia, but I am cranky as a five-year-old without that sleep.
I can't write at work. I've tried. I write pen-and-paper first which may slow the process, but in the end I'm far more cautious over each word I select which improves the output, if only marginally. My writing is better than my blogging (not difficult to conceive I'm sure).
Moreover, tonight I'm - apparently - orchestrating a birthday party. It only requires the aggregation of Sloppy Joes and yellow cake (and alcohol which I cannot consume due to recent oral piercing), but being notified at noon-thirty the day of means a lot more cleaning than I wanted to do. And I was looking forward to tackling The Trial tonight. (Kafka, for those less inclined.)
No more! My resolution as of now - no pathetic waiting for an arbitrary Gregorian timestamp - is to write three hundred words a day. Three hundred. That's all. Just a hair over a double-spaced page in OpenOffice. The trick here, for myself, is to not only get into the habit of writing every day, rain or shine, but to have the breathing room to pause over previous work and edit.
The three hundred baseline is for those days that I stare at the blinking cursor hating everything, at all, ever. No matter what, I can at least squeeze that much out, even if it's something I delete the next day. So long as I put something down, and tried, I can call it time well spent.
And this small scratching of verbage won't interfere so much with my having an existence outside of work, which I'm sure those other entities in my life appreciate. Except the cat. She loves sitting on my lap when I write.
As I wrote this, I overheard someone order a pizza to be delivered to work. Good Lord, that sounds delicious. Steady, Morgan. Maintain.
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