Do successful writers write every day? (And other process questions.)

Write every day.

It’s quite possibly the most common writing advice I heard when I was younger. And while I write a lot, it’s also advice I never really took.

Because every day isn’t realistic for me and probably hasn’t ever been. My productivity doesn’t follow a consistent daily pattern. Life gets in the way (shocker, I know).

Really, what people mean when they say write every day is:

:: Develop a consistent writing habit

:: Don’t wait for inspiration

:: Write a lot of words, because like anything else, the more you do a thing, the better you get at it

The reason I was thinking about this today is that I finished another (my seventh!) novel manuscript. For the last few manuscripts, I’ve used a tracking tool (Pacemaker) to measure my progress toward a word count goal. Which means at the end of a draft, I have a very lovely chart that shows what my particular writing progress looks like.

It is, as you might guess from the above, not daily and not consistent. (And that’s even when I wrote a whole-ass novel in 20 days! I had 0-word days during that sprint.)

So, in case that helps you visualize what your own progress might look like, here are those charts…the visual representation of the ebbs and flows in inspiration, available time in my day, etc.

THE EMPRESS

The Empress was an IP project (meaning: a collaboration) with Netflix, and the timeline was one of the fastest I’ve ever seen.

Still, there are 0-word days in there. And I’m fascinated to see that my trend was usually three days of hitting high word counts, then a 0 or low-count day, then another three days of epic sprinting.

WE ARE THE BEASTS

My 2024 release is also a whole lot of peaks and valleys. There aren’t as many 0-word days in here, but there is a trend of needing a little ramp-up time before I start hitting really massive word counts.

PANSIES

The draft I just finished (my queer, anti-fascist historical heist book, which an editor has not snapped up yet) has a similar pattern of ramping up slowly and hitting my highest word count (by far) in the home stretch.

* * *

Alright, sports fans, that’s all she wrote.

What does your progress look like?