I’ve always believed the best way to learn is from experience. Especially when it comes to writing. The only prerequisite for calling yourself a writer is that you actively engage in the process of writing on a regular basis, but it’s so much easier said than done. So many of us say it far more often than we do it. We’re going to write a book. We can’t wait to write this article we’ve had in mind. But actually doing it? Some days, it feels nearly impossible.
When I first started “writing about writing,” I knew I didn’t know everything. But I still thought I knew far more than I did. There’s experiencing, and then there’s prolonged lived experience — having done something enough vs. having practiced something so long and so faithfully that as much as you might cringe at the thought of calling yourself an expert, by definition, that’s what you’ve become.
Even in expertise, it’s impossible to know everything — and who wants to be the person who knows everything? But as an expert, I can now look back at many of the aspects of writing I once thought I’d mastered and shake my head. When it comes to the process of writing as a long-lived experience, I still don’t know much. But I know a lot about what I thought I knew before. Rather, what I wish I’d known back then.
The Blog That Made Me Believe Too Much
For some context, I started a blog about writing — I think I originally titled it “Writer’s Blog” not because it was original but because it injected a small dose of joy into my bloodstream every time I saw it — when I was 16. I had written several drafts of very bad novels, but that in itself was an achievement my mentors were trying to convince me I should be proud of. This was one of many reasons I launched a blog. At the time, many successful authors and aspiring writers alike had blogs. Many still do, but in 2009, it was still enough to maybe get you noticed. It got me my first writing internship, because again, these things were possible in days of internets past.
Blogging prompted me to overshare relentlessly, but it also had an unintended side effect: It taught me to write consistently and in my own voice. It forced me to learn by doing. The longer I did it, the more I trained myself to write — in quality, of course, but also in quantity. I wrote a lot. Thousands of words a day sometimes. Many of you weren’t around when I challenged myself to write a million words in one year, but I did it. And I was convinced that all of this and more meant I had become an expert in the art of the prolific — that I could teach other writers, through my own experience, how to write more. More consistently, more quantitatively. More overall.
I believed that I had somehow mastered something many writers before me never had. And then I grew up.
A Writer In the Real World
I want to pause for a moment to reassure you that prolific writing does not equal poor prose. You can write a lot of good words in a short amount of time. When I “grew up” so to speak — as much as any of us ever should — I simply shifted lifestyles and, therefore, perspectives. I honor those who have figured out how to “make writing happen” in their own complicated lives. Perhaps we are all on a journey of self-discovery when it comes to defining where writing fits into our ever-expanding list of priorities. And perhaps that’s a good thing.
What happened when I “grew up” was this: I moved across the country, moved in with a life partner for the first time, and began co-parenting the dog equivalent of an eternal toddler (some call them Siberian Huskies). I switched jobs, I struggled to navigate co-maintaining a household for the first time in my life, and suddenly, I realized it was long past time to rewrite my priorities. I’d never done that before. Writing and keeping myself alive had usually been the only things I’d really needed to care about outside of work.
Suddenly, finding time to write was no longer the thing I’d been telling my audience was “essential” all this time. Because outside of professional obligations, I completely stopped doing it. I may have had the desire, but I did not have the energy, or the time, or the patience. Almost overnight, my dreams of one day becoming a novelist all but vanished.
Before then, I had never encountered a moment in my life where I had to set aside my deepest ambitions to prioritize things that were more important. Before, I’d unknowingly operated entirely from a place of privilege, where I had the rare luxury of not only being able to focus on my writing career almost full-force, but also the ignorance to believe that just because I could manage it, everyone else could too. If I could write 500 words on my lunch break, so could anyone.
We learn by living. I didn’t know how wrong I was until my life changed, and all my general assumptions about adulthood dissolved at my feet.
The Tired Adult’s Guide to Writing Something, Maybe
Life changes as you move through it, and I’ve come to land in a place where I can more expertly balance my writing ambitions with everything else I’ve deemed important to the well-being of myself and those around me. I’m writing a blog post on my lunch break, after all. It’s not going to happen every day, but it’s happening today.
What I know now — something I did not know before simply because I hadn’t known better yet — is that if writing is important to you, you will get around to writing. But that does not mean it will be easy, nor will you be able to focus solely on writing at any given time. There will be stretches of time where you write nothing because you cannot make it work. You are not a failure for this. You aren’t doing something wrong. You are a human being with responsibilities to things other than your writing goals. You’d be much worse off overall if you neglected everything else in favor of your writing, at least all the time.
These days, I am a writing expert mostly due to the fact that I am painfully aware of how naïve I used to be. I cannot take back the advice I used to give or the tone with which I gave it. But I can, instead, approach my desire to help other writers succeed with a much more forgiving, inclusive message moving forward. I have a lot more in common with the average aspiring writer now than I used to. Some days, I don’t get around to writing. I’ve gone months, maybe even years, without journaling in the recent past. I have considered giving up for no reason other than life was too hard and I didn’t have room for it at the moment.
I’m much more qualified to share my experiences and suggest strategies than I was when I started out. That might be the most important lesson of all — that I may not have known how misguided I was then, but I can now use that to fuel a much better attitude toward writing because of it.
Now, let’s all get back to writing.
Meg Dowell is the creator of Brain Rush, dedicated to helping writers put their ideas into words, and Not a Book Hoarder, celebrating books of all kinds. She is an editor, writer, book reviewer, podcaster, and photographer passionate about stories and how they get made. Learn more
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