I wrote this piece earlier this year just before the onslaught of the university began. I had been doing a daily writing challenge since the beginning of 2021 and this is a piece I wrote about my experience of writing everyday.
I’ve always put myself into the box labelled, “ a writer”. I wrote written narrations, essays for school, character stories with friends and I journaled almost every day. But then in my last few years of high school, I became frantically busy with exams, tests and all that painful stuff... And my writing withered away into something I didn’t know. I would still journal and ‘ try ’ to write a story but it felt as if I was squeezing a dry lemon. There just didn’t seem to be much creativity left in me and that left me wondering if I was even a writer.
So during my gap year last year, I consciously made the decision to write as much as I could. It was freaking hard but I pushed past that don’t-want-to feeling and just did it. But I didn’t feel creative, I didn’t even feel like my stories were any good. This year I decided to take that whole decision a step further: I decided that I was going to write every single day for the rest of the year. It didn’t have to be a masterpiece every day - I just needed to practice my craft like a good athlete. 💪
Easy peasy right? When I began I was fully convinced that writing 365-days in a row was going to be super easy, a piece of cake. It was fun and I enjoyed it. Every day I would set a timer for 10-minutes, find a lekker writing prompt and then just write fast and hard.
But by day 4 I was exhausted. I loved writing but making the time, taking the time to write was so, so hard! It was so much easier to watch random YouTubes, scroll through Pinterest than to sit down, focus and write.
But I kept on writing. One day I would do a writing prompt and then other days I’d work on one of my short stories. And slowly, slowly, I could feel my creativity and my imagination waking up again. I actually had ideas for stories; so many ideas that I couldn’t handle them all. This was big for me: I hadn’t had a proper story idea in ages. My longest writing streak thus far (February 2021) is 12 days. It has been hard - honestly, you feel drained, but creatively empowered!
Pros of writing every day:
You’ll have a beautiful collection of your own scribbles.
Utilising your creative side more each day.
Writing goals ( like writing a 2,000-word story) becomes doable instead of impossible.
Cons of writing every:
You’re not going to have so much time for YouTube and Pinterest.
Getting up super early or being a midnight owl to capture those scribbles.
Elizabeth Gilbert said in her beautiful book, “Big Magic”:
“ I wrote every day throughout my twenties. For a while, I had a boyfriend who was a musician, and he practised every day. He played scales; I wrote small fictional scenes. It was the same idea - to keep your hand in your craft, to stay close to it. On bad days, when I felt no inspiration at all, I would set the kitchen timer for thirty minutes and make myself sit there and scribble something, anything. I had read an interview with John Updike where he said that some of the best novels you've ever read were written in an hour a day; I figured I could always carve out at least thirty minutes somewhere to dedicate myself to my work, no matter what else was going on or how badly I believed the work was going.”
It isn’t easy by far, you have to sacrifice something, but think about it: each daily scribble is forming you into the writer you want to be.
See you all soon x