The advice everyone gives you is actually pretty good advice

“Writers write.”

“You’ve got to just start writing.”

“Write every day.”

Everyone who “wants to write” has read a zillion incarnations of the advice above. I’ve talked to a ton of writers who have struggled with it. I have struggled with it. We all ask other, more prolific and successful writers different versions of a follow-up question that essentially amounts to “yeah, but how do you write, how do you start, how do you do it every day.”

I’ve wrestled with this for the better part of 20 years, and recently I’ve come to amend this advice to myself. I figured I’d recommend it to others as well.

“Writers write. You’ve got to just start writing. Try to write every day.”

So much of the struggle is about feeling failure if you don’t keep it up. Missing a single day can be devastating and make you feel like you’re just not up to the task like professionals are. I’ve gone through streaks where I write every day for weeks or even months, but then I fall off one morning and I concede defeat for months or years. Only recently have I given myself permission to miss a day here and there without thinking I’ve totally blown it.

I’ve also tempered my expectations on output. I used to feel like a failure if I didn’t get 500 words of prose down. In comics, I felt like less than 4 or 5 pages was unworthy of a sitting. Then, about a month ago, I decided that I was going to try to write every day, that it was okay to miss a day if I had to, and that when I sat down to write, the minimum acceptable output was a single comic page.

A single comic page is really not a lot of words. Sometimes it can be 500-750, but usually it’s 200-300. And it’s sloppy. It’s mostly descriptive. It’s not a lot of writing. This is great, because I firmly believe that most writers actually hate writing and if they’re being honest with themselves, prefer to have written.

In a writing Discord, I mentioned I was trying to do one page a day, and of all people, Cullen Bunn chimed in and said “one page a day adds up to 18 whole comic issues a year.”

That totally changed my perspective on productivity in comics. 18 issues a year is more issues than come out in a monthly series, so by just writing a single page every day, you’re writing more than a monthly. And some days (I’ve found most days) when you’re writing every day, you write more than one page. But one page, when you’re also thinking about what you want to write in the shower, on walks, when you’re rolling around in bed in the middle of the night, is such a minimal time commitment. You can do one page most days. You can do it in 15-20 minutes if you need to. That means you can write a monthly comic if you can find like half an hour a day.

I have written previously about how a lot of the best advice isn’t in the advice, but in being ready to hear it and receiving it exactly the right way. I guess I was finally ready to hear “write every day,” and with the help of other writers, found that the small output I’d committed to was actually a pretty huge output over time.

So I don’t know, give it a try, writers. Try to write a page every day and don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day or so. You’re bound to get something you want to share with the world if you keep cracking at it.