Friday, October 12, 2012

The importance of writing creatively every day

By Dennis Mellersh

In looking at different methods of how to write the manuscript for your book, it is worth emphasizing the importance of writing something new every day.

In your efforts to write a book, it will be difficult to achieve the success you want if you approach your writing on a sporadic basis.

Writing something every day is much better for keeping the creative juices flowing for your book idea, compared with writing a lot one day, with days going by where nothing is written.

In my own writing I went through a period where because of a variety of personal issues, there was a long period where I wrote little. The result was that I gradually entered a state of having a type of writer’s block where ideas were not forthcoming.

But once I started the practice of writing even a little each day, I found that once again I started to have ideas on other topics to write about. Writing regularly, even a little bit each day, leads to more writing.

Even if you do not work on writing the manuscript for your book every day, you can write daily by contributing comments on blogs that interest you, or by writing your thoughts on various blog posts to the authors of the posts. If you are not comfortable with commenting directly, write down your reactions in your own words to articles on blogs of interest or about stories in the newspaper.

I have also found it fun throughout my writing career to write out passages from books that interest me on file cards, or index cards, usually the three-by-five-inch size. You might consider writing out passages in books, such as novels, that you consider to be good examples of excellent writing. Or, rewrite those passages in your own words for creative writing practice.

I recall one passage I read in a book  by the historian Arnold Toynbee in which he said that he had books planned years in advance and generally governed his note taking in accordance with the history books or papers he was planning to write.

The method you choose in order to make yourself write creatively each day is not as important as making sure you do it.

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