“The trouble with daily life,” someone once said, “it’s that it’s so daily.”
And Daily is a giant.
Writing is like that.
It can be a day at the beach, sunny and warm; or a walk in the park, light and breezy; or a safari, peering through thick jungles hoping the wildlife doesn’t eat you; a mountain climbing expedition, toiling painfully up a slippery slope, praying you don’t fall, whispering lest an avalanche come down on your head; or even a mad quest to kill a giant.
But it’s Daily: whether or not you have something to say, to express, to vent, to exult, to lament, or even to scream, raging against the impossibility of putting words on a page, his demands never go away.
So you do the same thing you would in “real” life: you sleep at night, dreaming of new vistas. You get up and get a cup of coffee, waiting for the caffeine to come out and live through you, driving you on. You eat breakfast—just a blog entry—and a sandwich for lunch—a couple quick reviews of someone else’s work, with a bit of acerbic commentary for lunchmeat—preparing for dinner—that final fast-moving chapter of the novel you’ve been working on for a decade now.
Just fighting the giant and not dying, day after day, like my mother did to survive raising fifteen children.
There’s a secret in all this you should know, though, if you’re going to overcome.
The giant hates to be bored.
You overcome Daily by routine, by the ongoing practice of the tedious sameness of habits and traditions, applied to writing.
Every day.
