Comparison Is the Thief of Joy (and Success)

[This article originally appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Writer's Digest magazine.]

You have to write every day.  

You’ve heard this, right? It’s a common piece of writing advice, that the only way to achieve your publishing dream is to get words on a page every single solitary day.  

And it makes a certain degree of sense. Having a routine can be helpful. Some words are preferable to no words, even if they aren’t very good; you can always go back and replace them with better ones.  

But on three separate occasions, I’ve had writers say to me they don’t think they’ll ever get published, because someone told them this little bon mot, and the demands on their time are too great.  

They have a job, a sick relative, a kid … whatever it was, they simply could not write every day.  

I told them all the same thing, and I’ve repeated this to other writers countless times, because it’s an important little piece of perspective: I do not write every day, and I’m a full-time author. In fact, I can’t remember the last day I wrote something (excluding, now, this article). 

Actually, I just went back and checked. It was two weeks ago when I sent pages to Jeff Rake for the sci-fi series we’re co-writing together.  

What did I do in the interim?  

It was summer, so I hung out with my daughter, celebrated my partner’s birthday, and took some much-needed rest because I was feeling a little burnt out. No one kicked in my door to cancel my contracts.  

I work best in large chunks. I know this about myself. Sometimes that means bingeing 8- to 10,000 words in a few days, fueled chiefly by Cheez-Its and Diet Coke.  

Point is, it doesn’t matter if you write every day, or every other day, or once a week.  

The only thing that matters is that the work gets done. 

And this, my friends, is why I think a lot of writing advice sucks. 

***

Wait, that’s a little pointed, and some nuance is required.  

The way a lot of people interpret writing advice sucks.  

It’s advice. It’s not fiat. Stephen King’s On Writing is not the Constitution. Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! is not the Bible. Lisa Cron’s Story Genius is not the Code of Hammurabi.  

Craft books are great. So are conventions, and writing classes, and MFA programs—and magazines like Writer’s Digest. They are chock-full of things that could possibly be useful. 

But you can’t assume something that worked for someone else is going to work for you. You should approach all of this stuff—even the stuff I’m telling you—with a big box of Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt.  

Your process is like a fingerprint. Wholly and utterly unique to you. Sure, there are some writing rules I think are solid across the board. Elmore Leonard’s suggestion that every writer get no more than two or three exclamation points per 100,000 words of prose is a good one. 

Now, I know a lot of writers who don’t outline. Pantsers, they call themselves. Lunatics, I say. Doesn’t work for me. I need a road map. I have to see the shape of the story before I start, I have to know the ending, and even if I take some detours, I’ll write myself in circles without a clear pathway.  

Then there’s my buddy Jordan Harper, author of such novels as She Rides Shotgun and Everybody Knows. Jordan writes out of order—starting with his favorite scenes before stitching them together. To me, this is demented. I write in a straight line and cannot conceive doing it like that. 

And yet, Jordan is one of the best writers I know. 

Would I be a better writer if I wrote like Jordan? I doubt it. What I’m doing is working for me, so I’m going to stick to it. Not to say I don’t have more to learn; my process is always evolving. But I like my linear drafts.  

You never know when a piece of advice is going to become useful, even if you’re adjusting it or changing it to suit your needs. Another good example is my pal Jon Gingerich, who wrote The Appetite Factory. He also writes stellar short stories, and he once told me that he’ll draft a story and then delete it. A few days or a week later, he’ll write it again.  

He’ll ultimately do this several times before he lands on a draft he’s happy with. 

This is sheer madness. You’re going to spend so much time getting those words onto the page and just get rid of them?  

But it works! His stories are amazing. His thinking is that he’ll never forget the good stuff, the bad stuff will disappear into the ether, and the bits in the middle that were still coming to life will have time to marinate.  

I would never do this for a short story. But I have adopted this for my outlining process. I will often bang out my major story points for a book and then junk it. I’ll do it two or three more timesbefore I get started.  

Jon is right: The good stuff stays, the bad stuff goes, and all the liminal stuff in the middle comes into focus as you’re turning it over in your head.  

Then there was that time I thought I was writing my books wrong, because everyone I knew was writing these big, sprawling drafts, and then editing them down. Their first pass would come in at 120,000 words, and the finished product, after cuts, would be closer to 80,000.  

Overwriting, they called it.  

But my drafts were around 50,000 words, and then I would go back in and add stuff on. It worked, but still, I worried I wasn’t reaching my true potential as a writer. Then I had a conversation with thriller author Chelsea Cain, and she told me she did the same thing. 

Underwriting, she called it.  

Suddenly, I realized I wasn’t doing it wrong; I was just doing it the way that worked for me.  

***

This past summer I taught a module on outlining at Seton Hill University, where I’m a mentor in the MFA program. A few of the students pulled me aside after and asked to see one my outlines, so they could see how to do one. 

And I told them no.  

It’s not that I’m averse to sharing—it is caring, after all—but I didn’t want them to think that the way I do it was the way they were supposed to do it. I told them to start scratching down notes and let Jesus take the wheel. 

Yes, hearing about the habits of others can be helpful, but writing is an act of creation. It’s making something out of nothing.  

(Unless you’re using AI to assist you, then you’re just stealing the hard work of other people, myself included, and I will never take you seriously.) 

Sorry, went off on a tangent there …  

The point is, so much of writing is looking at a blank page and filling it. Your process is just another blank thing that needs to be filled out. And nothing is set in stone. You can do literally anything you want as long as your reader can follow along (just, really, hold it on the exclamation points).  

I say again, the only thing that matters is the work gets done. 

Which brings us back to the demanding jobs and the sick relatives and the kids. Life stuff. I’m in a position of privilege, where I can write full-time. I make my own schedule, and if one day I decide I’d rather take my daughter to a water park, I can do that. 

But I remember those dark days, in the before times, when I would wake up at 4:45 a.m. to go to the gym before work, so that when I got home, I could focus on finishing my first novel. It wasn’t fun, but it’s what I needed to do.  

I’m not saying you have to wake up before the sun.  

But the work had to get done.  

You might need a ritual or a routine. And that’s fine. Some people are wired like that. I’m not a fan myself, because I found if I didn’t nail down all the various elements of the ritual, then I couldn’t write. It became more of an impediment than it was empowering.  

What I learned from being a parent—and was far more in line with who I am as a writer—is that sometimes you have small windows to work, and you have to take them.  

This is a useful muscle to develop. After my daughter was born, I knew that when she took her afternoon nap, I had two hours to write as much as I could, because after that, the terrors would resume.   

But what about writer’s block, you might ask?  

What happens when you’re all jammed up in those stolen moments?  

Let’s talk about that. I’m of the belief that it doesn’t really totally exist.  

Forgive me for going a little lowbrow here, but it’s the best analogy I can think of: Do you sit on the toilet if you don’t have to go to the bathroom? I suspect not, unless you have very limited seating in your home.  

Sometimes you may not want to write. 

And that’s OK.  

Writer’s block is not an invisible fence built around your creative ability. It’s not physically restraining you. There have certainly been days where I did not want to write, but knew I had to get some work done—to meet a goal or a deadline—and I pushed my way through that feeling. 

Because, again, sometimes a few words are better than no words. 

But if there’s a day that I carve out for writing and I find myself staring at Word as I catapult between Instagram and YouTube and my inbox … sometimes the best thing to do is to close the laptop and put on a movie, or go for a walk, or do the dishes. Something to get me out of my head. 

Something that refills the creative well.  

It’s the same way that sometimes when I can’t fall asleep, I get frustrated because I can’t sleep, and that makes it harder to sleep, and then I’m in a doom spiral, scrolling through TikTok videos at 2 a.m. and wondering how many gallons of coffee I’ll have to drink the next day to be functional.  

Writer’s block is just a little frustration spiral, and the best way to get out of it is to give yourself a little grace. Focus on something else. 

 Sometimes a good movie or book is enough to shake things lose—something to remind us how powerful stories are, and the privilege it is to create them.  

What I’m saying is, don’t be so hard on yourself. 

***

That’s the point of all of this, really.  

Don’t be so hard on yourself.  

This is such a nutty thing that we do. We spend months, sometimes years, sitting in a dark room, by ourselves, with something inside us we want so desperately to share. We have to be stubborn and deluded enough to think that one day it might pay off. Until it does, we have no way of knowing.  

And there are impediments everywhere.  

Some can’t be avoided. If you have to work 80 hours a week to keep your rent paid and your family fed, that’s what you need to do. No one’s going to blame you if you can’t stick to a daily writing schedule. 

But if someone says you can’t be a writer because you should only do things a certain way? Tell them to kick rocks.  

Better than that, prove them wrong.  

You come across an accepted piece of wisdom, and it just doesn’t work for you? Ignore it. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the one to crack the exclamation point thing.  

(But I doubt it—seriously, stop using so many!!!!) 

The most important thing is that there are countless pathways on this beautiful and insane journey. And your success or failure has nothing to do with reading a particular craft book, or studying with a certain author, or joining an MFA program, or writing every morning at 5 a.m. 

It’s whether you’re stubborn and deluded enough to keep going.  

***

There’s one last thing I’m going to encourage you to do. One piece of advice I do think is worth following.  

Own what you do. Be proud. 

Because I’m tired of meeting folks at conventions who tell me they’re “trying” to be a writer. To me that says every time you open up Microsoft Word, Clippy shows up like Gandalf in the Mines of Moria and proclaims: “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”  

You’re not trying. You’re doing.  

My CV is pretty long—10 solo novels, numerous collaborations, short stories, comic books. I am blessed.  

(Though there are still days imposter syndrome looms large, and I wonder why anyone would want to read my dumb stories; spoiler alert, that feeling never goes away).  

If you’re still working on the first novel and don’t have a single publication credit to your name, just remember, you and I are on the same road. 

I’m just a little further down. That’s all.  

It’s up to you to catch up. 

And if you are stubborn and delusional, if you find the time and put in the work, you will.   

The most important thing you can do is commit your time and energy to building your process—one that is yours, and yours alone. That’s the thing that’ll carry you a little further on down the road.  

My first novel took me five years to write. These days, I can turn a book out in five to six months. Part of that comes from the fact that I’m a former journalist, and I’m used to meeting deadlines. Part of it is that I do a ton of outlining and research, so the book is mostly in my head by the time I write the first sentence.  

And part of it is because I type absurdly fast. 

But the most important thing I did was spend time developing and honing my process. I’ve taken advice, and I’ve ignored it. I’ve made mistakes, and I’ve learned from them. I’ve adopted techniques and made up others entirely.  

My process will continue to grow and change, because no one ever steps into the same river twice.  

That’s fine. 

All you have to do is get the work done.