I don’t know about calling it practice. Is writing ever practice or is it just that sometimes the writer hits a flow, producing something the world wants to see?
Anyway, I think writing daily is important.
It takes so long to get to good writing, to write things that are relatively error free and which actually say something. I once wrote/used my way through a reem of blank computer paper and didn’t show anyone any of it. Not one thing. And that wasn’t my earliest stuff either—I was catching vibes by that time. The important thing then was to get myself into a daily habit, to write even when the writing wasn’t easy.
Sometimes I got home from work and hit pen to page immediately. Sometimes, I made a fancy af dinner and then wrote. Sometimes, I got halfway through a bottle of Jack before anything slurred its way away from me.
At first, it was difficult to just write.
I had thought about writing in terms of one poem at a time, one piece of experience, then another. Then I put what sense of freedom and in-the-momentness I learned in freestyling into my writing. By the point I was writing every day, I didn’t care when sheet after sheet got filled to the edge with b.s. or useless ranting or legitimately insightful expostulation. The floor somehow felt cleaner, or more well-used, when it was covered with discarded pages of writing.
All a part of the process.
Eventually, you hit a stride, right? Eventually, what words are coming out and how they are coming out and to what end they are being written stops rattling around in your head. Eventually, the only thing that matters is that you’re at your desk, having just looked down from a window, from a thought, a feeling, and that you are writing.
These blog posts are up on my computer just about every day. I work them over time, making sure I’m saying what I intend to (someday I hope to post every day and not worry so much about the “end product”) and that I’m figuring out this blogging voice of mine.
When I’m not working on posts, I’m writing new poems and essays, revising or formatting manuscripts or brainstorming things to come. The point is, there is writing in every day of my life.
If there isn’t any writing, it kind of hurts. It feels like I left my cat at the vet for too long. It’s the same thing with reading, but that’s for another post.
Dan Dorman 