How to Write Every Day: A Memoir

How to Write Every Day: A Memoir

On February 22, 2019, I wrote my daily writing comment, Not feeling well. Forgot to write.

I don’t know what I was sick with. I didn’t wrote down ,u affliction, and one is sick so often, you can forget things. Like the daily writing. It can slip your mind.

And that was the last time I missed a day of writing. I have written every day for five years.

I guess that’s an admirable accomplishment. I guess.

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I have written every day for five years. This little book is a self aggrandizing celebration of this act. You can stop right now. You don’t need to go on any longer with this insipid piece of self congratulation.

Or you can go on. Because this might be a book that will help you be a better writer.

Now that’s a tall order.

No one can make you a good writer or a bad writer.

No one can give you advice on writing. We all do and then somewhere in our How to be the great writer book we will say, This is all subjective and it might not work for you. So why the fuck am I reading this book if it isn’t going to help me? 

That’s a true point. You can stop right now. You might be reading the ebook sample of this thing and think to yourself, What the hell, he is telling me that he can’t give you any advice. Time to move on to find a book that will give me everything I need to know to be the next Stephen King.

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Here is a truth for me.

I read a lot of How to Write books and get pissed off. I mostly Hote Read them. They are all so smug and so not about what I need as a writer.

But I have found a few books that are great for me. They tend to be books that are just about the writer’s personal process. They are not giving advice, they are just showing what works for them. What makes them satisfied as a writer?

My favorite books about being a writer is Adrienne Kennedy’s The People that Led Me to My Plays. She just lists the people and things that inspired her and how they formed her.

This is not how to but this is what happened.

I do not have the life or experience of Ms Kennedy, but I found parallels between how I think about writing and what she was saying. And even more importantly, I found the differences between her and myself even more instructive and helpful.

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That is what this little missive is. This is my process for me and if you can find something worthwhile in it, cool. If you don’t see anything between myself and you, then ask the questions. Why do I do it this way? Would it be better if I changed my writing method?

This is my little gift to myself. I have written a lot of words in the past five years. About 1.5 million words. That’s good. But then you will hear from professional writers who do a million words a year or something like that.

I write every day, but I don’t write a lot. But let’s get back that in its time. This is me as a writer and how I now write every day and why I think this matters to me. It doesn’t have to matter to you at all, but I just wanted to share this.

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\ This book is for me. Any piece of writing has to have a reason to be.

For this book, it is to see if I can define why this habit has been good for me.

And if it is good for me, maybe you can find something in it for yourself.

This will not be a slog to get to the parts that matter to you. I promise to keep this short. I write short because long books always freaked me out as a reader. And I found out I love short books. Now that I write, short books are the way I express myself.

And with short books, you never have to wait too long to get to the point of the whole thing. Thank god.

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Let’s start, not at the very beginning, because like I said, I want to get to the end of this before you or I are bored with it.

So let’s start when I was a slam poet and I wrote every week.

And I thought that I was a prolific son of a bitch what with writing a poem a week.

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I found poetry open mics and slam poetry when I really needed it.

I had always written. I wrote plays and stories and thought I was the shit.

I was not. I was just another person who worked a little at writing and thought that the one or two things I did was going to blow everyone away and I was to be thrust into fame and fortune.

There was no schedule or routine for writing. Sporadic intensity was the best way to describe my writing methodology. Crappy was another