5 Strategies for Writers to Keep Writing

Keep writing. That’s all there is to it. That simple, foolproof advice should keep you going, should work for you every day as long as you need. Until it doesn’t. I learned that the hard way.

(What to Say When Someone Wants to Kill You.)

The two best phrases anyone told me about how to approach writing—and both basically say the same thing—were “write like a fiend,” which the poet Laura Mullen said to me (I was her student at the University of Iowa), and “keep writing,” which my father told me all the time. The first was perfect while I was an undergrad hellbent on getting into the Writers Workshop, an urging to improve through repeated action (which I did, thankfully), and the second, imparts a practical persistence, good for the long haul. I heard it all the time.

From the time I left home at 17, my dad and I talked on the phone once or twice a week and he ended every conversation we had with those two words, “keep writing.” Depending on how I was feeling, the words were either an annoyance, a joke, or incredibly helpful. Mostly helpful, a frequent nudge to do the work. It got so that in between conversations, I would hear his voice, a gruff half-bark that gave those words an insistence (it was not a suggestion or a request, “keep writing” was a command) that would send me to the typewriter (and later, the computer). It got that I was writing every day, sometimes just a sentence or two, sometimes like a productive fiend, but always something, until it became natural, part of the day, like brushing my teeth.

Then, when my dad died (at the age of 94), I stopped writing, worse, I didn’t want to write and wasn’t sure that I would start again. Apart from the usual anger and grief of losing a loved one, I had a crisis of faith, of sorts. I didn’t write for almost a month, the longest stretch without creative writing since I was nine or 10 years old. I missed my dad (of course), but I also missed hearing him say those words. But they were there. I could hear him. Every day I didn’t write I could hear him. And one day I had a phrase in my head, a phrase that got my attention enough that I scribbled it down and kept in my pocket (an old habit from when I was in college) and would think about during morning walks with one of our dogs.

The phrase led to some sentences and a paragraph, a free-floating idea about conflict between two brothers. It was a few unconnected, scattered paragraphs that weren’t going anywhere. But I was writing, unconnected sentences about a robbery, a fire, a fight, scattered pieces of a pictureless puzzle, maybe not even pieces of the same puzzle. And then, one morning, walking with the dog, it clicked. It was like an old engine that hasn’t been started in a while, that gasps and chokes for a while before it runs. But it ran. I saw the bigger picture; I understood the brothers; I knew the conflict, and I went home and wrote pages. I wrote like a fiend, and had the start of my latest novel, All We Trust. It was simple.

Okay, maybe not that simple. But the concept is: Keep writing. Here are some habits I’ve used to try and keep it simple, useful, and productive:

I never sit down to write unless I have something. A blank page/screen will stay blank. However, I hardly ever don’t have something to write. Some writers like to stop writing before they’re finished, leaving a chapter, scene, or even a sentence incomplete, so they have a natural start the next day. I tend to keep notes or phrases or fragments in my pocket (scribbled on paper, or on my phone), which give me a seed of something to work on.

There’s always time. A common complaint/excuse I hear is that someone doesn’t have the time to write; they work, have kids, are busy. But there are plenty of writers who had day jobs (especially early in their careers), from William S. Burroughs (pest exterminator) to Franz Kafka (insurance clerk), Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House for seven years before her first novel was published, and Frank O’Hara worked at the information desk at the Museum of Modern Art, writing many of his poems during his lunch hour (cf. Lunch Poems, 1965). Gabino Iglesias wrote an entire novel during his lunch breaks while working as a teacher, The Devil Takes You Home (2022) received the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, proving that 30 minutes a day is enough time to get good writing done.

Click to continue.

I never have a goal other than to put words on the page. I never know what I’m doing. I don’t know if I’m writing a sentence, a story, a novel, or nothing. The songwriter Jeff Tweedy (Wilco) has said that he never sits down to write a song, he sits down to write and sometimes a song comes out of it. That allows the freedom to do anything, try something I might not try in the framework of a story or a novel, but just have fun, which oftentimes leads to things I can use everywhere (for All We Trust, I had started writing the story from the different perspective of another character—just as an experiment—some of which I ended up using in the final novel). George Saunders is a proponent of writing without a plan—contending that if you’re not surprised as the writer, you won’t surprise your readers—and encourages writing to be fun (if it’s a chore for you, it probably will be for the reader as well).

A lot is trashed, but nothing is wasted. Any writing helps. Not enough attention is made to writing as exercise or practice. There’s a reason musicians play scales (no matter how accomplished) or baseball players spend time every day in the batting cage (or whatever your favorite sports analogy is); writing is that way too. Musician Brian Eno famously devised a series of flash cards (“Oblique Strategies”) to promote creativity for musicians (e.g. “not building a wall, making a brick” or “repetition is a form of change”) by engaging in productivity not directly related to the task at hand (what Eno calls “lateral thinking”). I’ve had abandoned stories, fragments of failed novels, provide direction or sometimes characters of subplots in novels (Raymond Chandler famously “cannibalized” his short stories for his novels, using them also as testing grounds for his longer works). No effort is fruitless. Exercise, practice, keep writing.

Find what works for you. There’s plenty of advice out there. The only thing that’s going to work is what works for you. For me, it was a steady refrain from someone I loved and listened to, but in the end, it had to come from me. You write because you have to; you have something to say that no one else has said before, or in the same way. You either write or there’s silence. It’s that simple.

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