Write Every Day

I write every day. My minimum goal is to record the events of the day in a journal. My ideal, which remains an aspiration in middle age, is to produce a publishable piece every 24 hours. I remain young enough to have hope, but I’m now old enough to be realistic, and I continue to practice. 

Readers ask me about writing; students too. They yearn to know how to do this. Since I have been doing it for as long as I can remember — whether on a Smith-Corona typewriter that would be considered an antique, or with pen on paper, or using a stylus on a PDA (personal digital assistant — the predecessor to the smartphone) — I have forgotten how to answer the question. I cannot imagine not creating.

Yet I can offer a bit of background. I studied writing in college. That major would not satisfy the “return on investment” standard that undergraduates apply in an era disapproving of liberal arts as frivolous. It didn’t pass the test of my parents either, who believed only the worst would come of words, since they had been Asian immigrants who had been able to win scholarships through their skills with numbers. I am glad, however, I made the decision that I did. I have supported myself ever since, comfortably enough, primarily by prose. Words are as practical as we care for them to be. People who do not care for them underestimate the power of words.

The workshops enforced discipline, and they taught me to overcome my natural fear of the blank page (now screen). The structure compelled me to meet deadlines. I had to become accustomed to, then comfortable with, the need to generate ideas by engaging with the world. As importantly, the gathering assured an audience. The class forced me to deliver criticism. That involved careful reading, not the careless style exploited to demonstrate comprehension on a standardized exam. If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader. The most solipsistic philosopher or original novelist participates in a conversation, even if to destroy the canon.

Thus I have cultivated a habit. I will admit to diligence, not boast of eloquence. I wish to be not only thinking, but thinking about thinking, meaning I am self-aware. There is not a moment I am not reading, writing, experiencing, or expressing. Everything is potential material. Someone cuts in front of me in line, seemingly deliberately, or vice versa, accuses me of that slight, though I had no such intent — no doubt each of us frames these encounters asymmetrically so. The incident opens up an opportunity to consider manners, the rule of law, why we accord moral priority based on first-in-time rather than an assessment of need or merit, race, gender, and happenstance. 

I make lists. I jot down vocabulary that I learn, phrases I can claim to coin, and concepts to elaborate. Thanks to cloud-based apps for text editing, even as I wait in line I can revise the next blog. If you want to be prolific, you have to put in the effort. As writing becomes constant, it becomes integral to life.

Here is a hypothesis. I am not persuaded that there is any correlation between life and life stories. Some people enjoy the most interesting existence, but they have no great stories to share. Although they climb mountains, literally, they are reluctant to articulate an account of the adventure, and, if they do so, it fails to communicate the emotion and the risk, depict the landscape and the companions, or explain the technique. There are too many dull examples with which each of us becomes familiar from disappointment at a dinner party. Other people seem ordinary, verging on boring, but they have a skill. Their descriptions are evocative, and they can summon in themselves as well as strangers every type of human feeling, from mourning over loss to laughing at it. The early novels of Nicholson Baker are evidence of our curiosity about what is happening in other people’s minds: he was able to annotate a ride up an escalator in an office building as if it were an epic to be recited by bards of the oral tradition.

I confess to indifference about where I appear in print. That likely has been detrimental to my career. I do not regret the choice, but I do not recommend it. I have a book to my credit (from a leading New York house), a co-authored textbook, and a dozen chapters, including those that have been peer reviewed. I have been assigned reading, which may be a dubious honor. I have had a byline on the op-ed page of the New York Times, more than once on its counterpart in the Washington Post, and in Detroit, Cleveland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and elsewhere. I also have contributed to specialty periodicals for law, higher education, and classical music; scholarly journals; ethnic press; regularly for five years at HuffPo; and in blogs on hobbies such as photography. The prestigious placements are worth more than pride for what they enable. They bestow the requisite bona fides in pitches, and they confer freedom to care less about perceptions. If you are dedicated to the writing, you should be concerned foremost with the writing. The success will follow.

On a recent sabbatical, I took up running. On a year off from my regular day job, I finished 36 half marathons. That has inspired my writing, about which more later. To run is to write, and writing about running itself is a demanding genre to try. 

There are two aspects of my avocation of running that provide analogies for writing. The first is that you improve by training. You have to train yourself to train yourself. It might start with a trick you play, the superego on the ego, the ego on the id, but it becomes real, as the id in turn demands of the superego. Second is that if I can do it, you can do it. A writer must believe in herself. She can assure herself that individuals of no greater talent have achieved her ambition.

My attitude toward writing is about much more than that, despite being conventional. Writing is not an activity. Writing is a necessity. That is my truth. Use it as you will.