Practice (and practise) makes perfect

One of the most common questions I’m asked as a new writer is ‘how do you find the time?’ And for a long time, I had no time. I worked full-time, had two children, a hellish commute, lots of work travel, liveblogging on the side. Also we were living in a building site and trying to stretch a really tight budget.

The budget is still tight, but lots of other things have changed. I now work three days a week, only commute on Wednesdays, my children have left home and my house is no longer a building site. Compared to lots of writers who are snatching pre-dawn half hours before the kids wake up, I have ACRES of time. I also have good mental and physical health and am naturally quite organised, and I don’t underestimate how much easier this makes things for me.

But most importantly, I practice writing rather than just practising it. I once read a thing about yoga that said ‘doing yoga is an activity, practicing yoga is a discipline’, which immediately put me off yoga because honestly, if I’ve gone to the trouble of rolling out a mat and farting my way through a sun salutation, I deserve the same yoga medal as everyone else.

Good writing undoubtedly takes practise; the more you do it, the better you get at it. But in this case I do think the element discipline DOES matter – finding time to write every day, even if it’s just ten minutes and a brain dump of disconnected thoughts or a snippet of dialogue or a character profile.

I started writing my first novel in April 2020, and there have been a handful of days since then when I haven’t written something. Often it’s nothing more than a list of thoughts for things to write about tomorrow, other times it’s five thousand glorious words that flow like silk from my writerly brain. According to Novlr, which is my writing software of choice, I’ve written an average of 1,079 words a day so far this year. That’s nearly 400,000 words a year, only some of which have ended up in the bin.

So make your writing a practice. Roll your mat out every day and write something, however small. Give it ten minutes, and if you’re not feeling it, go and watch Strictly or change the sheets or walk the dog. Take a moment to look up the difference between ‘practise’ and ‘practice’ and wonder why English is such a dumbass confusing language. Celebrate the fact that you can already speak it and don’t have to learn. Eat cheese, drink wine, have sex, then write some more tomorrow.

As Jodi Picoult once said, ‘you may not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.’