An hour a day. That was my main goal in recent months: devoting one hour a day, every day, to my novel in progress. It didn’t matter if I wrote 1,000 words in that hour or 200 or even zero, so long as I spent a full hour planning, researching, or thinking about the project in earnest.
Finding a solid hour every day was sometimes a challenge, but it’s not the challenge I want to discuss here. The truth is that I did find my way to the writing desk each day for the novel—but the struggle didn’t end there. At that point, my task shifted from merely showing up to actually making myself do the work. That meant not playing “just one quick warm-up game” of solitaire, or checking Facebook, or getting distracted by online “research” that inevitably devolved into falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole.
I had to avoid these distractions and instead remind myself that no matter how I spent that hour—whether on my novel or on something frivolous—the time would pass no matter what. Sixty minutes is sixty minutes. I could spend twenty-eight minutes writing and the remaining thirty-two scrolling through Facebook, or I could spend the full sixty working on the novel. It was my choice.
More than once, I sat at my desk during that hour of writing time and silently repeated, like a mantra: The hour will pass no matter what. Might as well make good use of it.
When a friend told me she was feeling anxious over her struggle to write, I reassured her that nearly every time I sit down to work on my novel, I have to force myself to begin. And I love writing. But it’s work, and it’s hard, and it’s so easy to fail. The only path I can see out of that struggle is to stubbornly persevere.
As if to prove to myself what I already know, I flipped through several writing advice books (one of the many perks of working in a large public library is that I have daily access to dozens and dozens of books on writing) to see what the experts have said on the matter. Here’s how they describe that struggle:
The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide by John McNally:
Perseverance is a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. It’s not just about putting in the daily work; it’s about putting in the years. I used to wonder why certain writers—even those writers who had published books—gave up writing altogether, but the longer I’ve been doing this, the question isn’t so much “why give up” as it is “why not give up?” At every step of the way, building (and then sustaining) a writing career is an uphill struggle.
The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner
Writing is a calling . . . But I assure you, you will never make yourself write. When writers say they have no choice, what they mean is: Everything in the world conspired to make me quit but I kept going.
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg:
This is the practice school of writing. Like running, the more you do it, the better you get at it. Some days you don’t want to run and you resist every step of the three miles, but you do it anyway. You practice whether you want to or not. You don’t wait around for inspiration and a deep desire to run. It’ll never happen, especially if you are out of shape and have been avoiding it. But if you run regularly, you train your mind to cut through or ignore your resistance. You just do it. And in the middle of the run, you love it. When you come to the end, you never want to stop. And you stop, hungry for the next time.
That’s how writing is, too. Once you’re deep into it, you wonder what took you so long to finally down at the desk. Through practice you actually do get better. You learn to trust your deep self more and not give in to your voice that wants to avoid writing.
Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True by Elizabeth Berg
If you are going to do more than dream about writing, you need to have a specific plan. You have to decide where, when, and how you are going to get started. The more concrete the details of this plan, the more likely you are to execute it. … Take yourself seriously; let yourself be a very high priority.
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott:
“But how?” my students ask. “How do you actually do it?”
You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so . . . [Y]ou hold an imaginary gun to your head and make yourself stay at the desk.
The hour will pass no matter what. Better make good use of it.