Write every day.

The mantra of everyone who has looked into the question of how to be a writer is "write every day". If you read a book about how to be a writer you will invariably see them telling you to write every day. Everybody insists on it because writing is like eating an elephant, a huge task that takes a long time.

If you write every day then you get ahead of the curve, and even though this is a substantial elephant that requires things like editing and getting your elephant published (I'd like to see a published elephant). It all has to start from your written work.

One thing I want to do with this blog is to report on how much writing I am doing. So today's writing has been this blog post and this week's writing has been several blog posts and some journaling. I would like to be writing more fiction, stuff that is more creative. But I haven't really felt particularly creative.

There have been studies done on the question of how people stick to writing. One I read about from one of Krashen's books found that people punished for not writing would write more, but have fewer unique ideas and had much reduced likelihoods of continuing with writing after the study finished. and the ones that wrote the most consistently were those that had someone they simply reported their writing to every week. And since writing is a battle of attrition against blank pages the winner is the person that does it most consistently.

I'll do a post later that goes into it better after I look up that study.