The Problem With “Just Sit Down and Write”

If you want to have written something (a book, an essay, a well-crafted email), you eventually have to write it.

This is an inconvenient reality, but an unavoidable one (and no: asking some kind of AI bot to write something for you is not writing—it’s prompting).

This means that at some point you’ll have to stop thinking about writing something, mapping it out, researching for it, and talking to other people about it and start applying ink to page or fingers to keyboard (or I suppose voice to transcription software).

The process of actually writing can be less fun and more stressful than those earlier steps because a book (or whatever) that isn’t yet a book exists perfect and pure in your mind, untouched by the inconvenient scrapes, scars, and dust motes of life. Writing can also be taxing, and sometimes (perhaps even often, at least on the first pass) what’s in your brain doesn’t come out the way you envisioned it.

That in mind, maybe the most common advice from authors directed at would-be book-writers is that you just need to sit down and write. Don’t make it more complicated than that: butt to seat, writing implement to writing surface.

But the problem with this advice is that while it’s absolutely that this is the basic process of making something like a book, it’s also incomplete.

Many of us have creative ebbs and flows throughout our days (or weeks), and that’ll sometimes mean our brains are more optimized for writing creatively in the early morning than in the afternoon, or that we have trouble focusing until we’ve done the dishes or until the house is empty of familial rabble (and totally, blessedly quiet).

Something I’ve discovered over the years is that though my writing-optimized periods sometimes flutter between different hours of the day, I can almost always trigger them if I need to: I just have to I set things up so I can (in theory) keep writing for hours if I desire.

Having a large chunk of time available (even if I don’t use it all) seems to ease my brain into “the zone,” whereas worries that I might get into said zone and then have to suddenly pull out of it can keep me from ever getting there in the first place.

Some of us may also be primed for different sorts of creative work at different times (or days, or weeks).

I sometimes divide my day up so that I’m writing in the morning and editing in the afternoon, because for whatever reason my brain seems to be biased toward those tasks during those respective periods.

This isn’t always the true, and all sorts of variables (when I eat, how well I slept the night before, what the weather’s like) can disrupt this semi-reliable pattern.

But does it make sense to “just sit down and write” when I’m feeling more primed for editing? Does it make sense to write just to write, even when I know I’ll probably scribble something that’s inferior to what I could scribble later in the day (or two days from now) with half as much effort and in half as much time?

Arguably yes. At least sometimes. Though it depends on the circumstances.

Forcing yourself to write even when you’re not feeling it can be valuable because there will be moments in which you have an impending deadline and you simply can’t afford to wait for inspiration (or the right combination of environmental elements) to strike. Learning to work through that kind of creative resistance allows you to do so when necessary, even if you usually try to better calibrate your brain and writing behaviors.

It may also be that what feels like a productive writing mode is actually just an easy writing mode. Maybe you write better (or write some types of things better) when it’s difficult and feels like you’re slogging rather than sailing. Maybe those effortful moments are strenuous in the same way lifting heavier weights than you can easily heft is strenuous (that is: productively, strength-buildingly strenuous).

Or maybe not. We’re all wired differently, and we all have different writing ambitions and priorities.

I’ve found it to be worth panting and gasping my way through writing, at times, though I’ve also found a lot of value in figuring out my rhythms and optimizing my writing cadence and habits accordingly.

As with many things in life, it may be that the best balance for most of us is somewhere on the spectrum between extremes: not tormenting ourselves with unnecessarily unpleasant and draining slogs, but also not relying so completely on the unknowable whims and winds of creative happenstance that we can’t hunker down and churn out readable prose any time we have reason (or the desire) to do so.