A good post from Chuck Wendig: Should Writers Write Every Day?
Here’s the money quote:
The greatest advice I think I offer to writers these days is to Know Thyself. Which is to say, figure out who you are as a writer. Your processes are your own to discover. Your voice is your own to seek and to find. Who you are and what you write and further, how you write, is something literally nobody else can tell you. So, should you write every day? Some will tell you YES YES YES, some will tell you NO NO NO, but the answer is, well, shit, I dunno. It’s both. It’s neither. All/none of the above. Maybe it’ll help you. Maybe it’ll hurt you. Maybe it’ll do the one until it does the other, because things work… until they don’t.
Yep, that.
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Know whether, if you stop, you will fall off the wagon and not write again for days.
This.
Mary speaks sooth.
Before deciding that you work best by writing only whilst inspired, try writing every day.
In season and out, inspiration and without.
There are many roads to completing a story. As Mary says, the only way to know if the Writing Every Day approach works for you is to try it.
If you try the Write When You’re Inspired approach, you might not write for days. Or weeks. Or, y’know, years.
Well, I’m certainly with Evelyn and Mary there — you better not depend on inspiration.
Especially if and when you hit the middle of the novel and bam! no more inspiration. That’s definitely not the time to decide you can’t write unless you’re inspired or in the mood or whatever.
For me personally, a strict daily minimum keeps me going through that sort of saggy-middle problem.
AFTER finishing a novel, I may indeed stop writing for days, or weeks, or months. That’s when I catch up (to the extent I ever catch up) on my TBR pile