Often I read advice from other writers. This is a confession of sorts because I have the guilty feeling that if I consider myself a writer then I wouldn’t need advice. But I suspect fellow writers have perused Open Culture postings titled “10 Writers Lay Out How to Write a Short Story” or “Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors”, the latter of which I’m really embarrassed to admit reading considering that I am way past the designation of ‘young’. Flavorwire, too, publishes similar pieces and recently previewed Sarah Stodola’s new book, Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors. Stodola found much diversity in the habits of writers like David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and George Orwell — autodidacts, nine-to-fivers, or slow and steady.

Some of the time I write every day, usually in the morning, because if I put it off, it doesn’t get done.  Interspersed with these spurts of discipline are periods when I write when the fancy hits me, which I really don’t recommend, for if I don’t write for a few days, you can label me restless, irritable, and distracted. I’ve noticed that my alternating styles align with where I am in a draft: Discipline reigns in the initial stages, fancy, during revisions. So, what does that pattern tell me? I’m more pleasant to be around when writing regularly and that revision is to be avoided. (It’s hard stuff, that revising!) Monitoring and noticing your writing behaviors can be illuminating and a way to change fancy to habit.

viagra prijs