The Grasshopper #50: Writing Every Day

An epiphany about the writing life

Mar 31, 2023

black cat — Photo by Yannick Menard on Unsplash

This week I got a call from an old girlfriend on the West Coast who needed to write an academic paper (she is a social work professor) and was blocked. She wanted to know how I write when that happens.

I told her it really doesn’t happen to me much anymore, and then I had a realization why that is. Writing has become a pleasure because I only write what I want to write after years of doing it for others.

Like most epiphanies this makes total sense when you think about it. For years I always felt my best motivator was a deadline, but those deadlines were largely determined by the needs of others. Now my deadlines are my own. If I miss one I only have myself to blame.

My writing habits are pretty consistent. I publish here on Wednesdays and Sundays and every day on Medium unless it’s a slow news day and nothing is striking me. I’ve learned not to think of those as writer’s blocks- they are just the price of writing stories that are based on current events.

Again, I have a fairly strict schedule but it is my schedule adapted to where my head is at these days and it has evolved over the past few years since the great disturbance.

For a site like Medium, publishing every day is a necessity if you want to make money consistently. You’re feeding the algorithm and some of its decision making takes note of frequency and read times overall for your work. In other words, if you pause you risk falling off the map.

My advice to my friend: just start writing anything and don’t worry about whether it’s any good. You’re priming the engine.

“Write a little bit every day, without hope and without despair.”

~ Isak Dinesen

Someone designed it

Things we take for granted department. Unless you live in raw nature, unclothed and in the elements, you are surrounded by someone’s life’s work, both mundane and sublime. I was looking at a bath mat I recently bought and wondered what anonymous soul had decided to make it look the way it does, sculpted enough to be more functional (less slipping) and more aesthetically appealing.

For a few moments after that I found myself looking at all the things I take for granted that are around me and appreciating that a person designed all of it. It made me realize the value of ordinary things in descriptive writing when you set a scene.

I’m not big on putting too much physical detail in a scene. I know I like to read and build an image in my head. Going into excruciating detail about what people look like and what they are surrounded by, can take away some of the mystery. Let your readers flex their imagination.

Writers, like other creatives, often have to do mundane work to clarify their message or to make a buck, our equivalent to designing that bath mat that caught my interest. This is true in any kind of writing. But the things you choose to focus on can be telling. The trick is to find a voice that still manages to keep interest when you need to get down into the details.

There is a phrase, ‘the telling detail’, something that reveals hidden things. You can use these telling details to move a story forward, change up pacing, and define character attributes. But they must be used judiciously unless you’re writing something like a murder mystery where every scene may require one.

Are you familiar with the concept of representational systems, the way people’s subconscious displays or intakes ideas and information? The idea is that most humans have a primary representational system that works on a subconscious level, and if you employ it you can build rapport.

The prime systems are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic (physical feeling). Olfactory (smell) is rarely a principal system in humans, but it is strongly associated with memory. All of us use them but you may have a principal one. Writers and musicians are typically auditory while an athlete might go more on physical sensation.

There are word choices for communicating with each type. Visceral words like hard, soft, and sharp are kinesthetic, saying a person has a loud personality might register with an auditory system or describing someone as bright, dull, or colorful, would resonate better with a visual person.

These are the kind of details an accomplished writer learns to work with, consciously or not. Appealing to different readers’ ways of processing details can be much more effective than simply filling in as much as you can. They’re more likely to absorb your writing on a subconscious level, which is where we feel something is good.

The concept of representational systems came out of psychotherapy designed to develop fast solutions for things like phobias. But my interest in it is as a writer. It offers another tool for building rapport with readers.

The Witness Chronicles, politics decoded

Discussion about this post