Writing is a Muscle

 "Sheila says the heart's just a muscle.

Sheila says the heart's just a muscle."

What do writers have in common with nursing parents? They're both very concerned with production and output. How many ounces of milk today? How many words did I write?

Despite nursing six children over thirteen years of my life, I don't have any advice on that. There's only so much you can do to increase milk supply. Word supply is infinite, though. The challenge is putting them onto the page. The good news is that you can increase your writing stamina and build up to the daily word count you want. 

When I pulled writing out of my hobby closet and brushed it off after a decade, I wrote sporadically. When I was excited about a scene or idea, I would write. When I wasn't inspired, I didn't. It took me a whole year just to settle on what idea I wanted to write. Then it took a round of the flu and walking pneumonia to really get serious about it. The rough draft of what became my high fantasy quartet took about a year and a half. It was a cluttered, overstuffed mess. As I outlined, made notes, and started rewriting it, I acknowledged that perhaps it was a duology. At the end of December 2020, I had to admit that it was a trilogy. I also knew that I wanted to get it done! The end was in sight. No more dawdling. 

I made the only New Year's resolution I've ever kept. I decided on Dec. 31st that I would write 1000 words on that manuscript every day until it was finished. I finished it on May 6th (I know, because I kept a document recording every single day's wordcounts). In that time, I missed two days: the day I took the Boy Scouts on a five-mile hike in freezing temperatures and Easter Sunday.

The first month, making my daily word count felt impossible. I had a toddler, a preschooler, and I was homeschooling my four older children, so I snatched writing time when I could. I would sit down for a ten-minute sprint and be appalled that I'd only managed a few hundred words. They felt like more. As the year went on, I grew faster. I could write for longer periods (when given the opportunity), and I learned to scribble down quick notes throughout the day, outlining what I would write later. 

Three books and sixteen short stories later, 1000 words isn't that much for me. It's often less than an hour out of my day. I've done more 3000-word days recently than I ever thought I could do without burning out. 

Because writing is a muscle. 

If I wanted to run a marathon (not something I ever foresee, but IF I DID), I wouldn't throw myself into running five miles right off the couch. I would fail. To run five miles or ten miles, or more, I would have to work on my stamina. I'd have to increase my strength. The writing I did before my New Year's Resolution had strengthened my writing muscles enough that 1000 words per day was possible. Doing it every day strengthened those enough that 1000 words per day is my baseline when I'm drafting. Authors who write thousands of words per day have worked up to it. They weren't doing that back at the beginning. Many of them will offer advice on how they built their writing muscles, whether it was a timer, doing structured sprints, journaling, or freewriting every day; they've been exercising their mind and its connection to their fingers, so they can do what they love more quickly and effectively. 

The only way to become a stronger, faster, better runner is to run. (I shall never be a better runner.) The only way to be a better, faster writer is to write, and sometimes, that means writing when I don't feel like it. 

Writing is a muscle. If you want to build it, you have to work it regularly. Not necessarily daily, as I did, but regularly.