Hello poets. A question that I often pondered when I first started my writer’s journey was how often I should be writing. This was a particularly burning question that gave me some bouts of anxiety, especially when I was a student in an MFA program. I was in search for some definitive answer, some textbook paragraph that would tell me the appropriate hours I needed to put in, but what I found out was (as I would about many things in the creative writing world) that the answers to many my questions were riddled in ambiguity and preference.
The truth is, a question like, “How often should one be writing?” is a query even MFA students and professional writers can’t seem to get a full grasp of and it just comes down to what works for them. I found out that after countless conversations with many writers including myself, this question can be generalized into two categories, those who produce a lot more if they produce daily, or others who produce more quality material if they don’t write on a day-to-day basis.
Daily Writers
1. The daily writers usually have a fixed time throughout the day in which they write. This can be early in the morning before the other realities of the day are available to disrupt the writing process, it can be any time slot throughout the day where the writer is available, or it can be at night, after the day is over and the writer has their time to process the day’s happenings. This fixed time assures the writer that there will always be a time to do nothing but pay attention to their literary passions.
2. Daily writers also prefer the consistency because it is a probability game. Not every poem that is written is going to be great, but the way I see it, a bad poem today prepares you for a “good” poem tomorrow. So let’s say hypothetically that for every 7 poems a poet writes, 4 of them are “good.” Poet A is writing every day while Poet B is writing 2-3 poems a week. If we run the numbers for a 30-day month, on average, Poet A will have 7 “good” poems while Poet B will have written 1 “good” poems. If they both continue that same pattern for 6 months, Poet A will be looking at approximately 36 poems to Poet B’s 12 poems. That’s why if we think about publishing, those who write daily are the ones who are usually in better standing.
Remember though: these are just some numbers I’m just throwing out there and they were by no means proven true by a scholarly journal. This is just to logically highlight one’s chances of producing good material. Some weeks you will be writing great material and then other weeks you may be in a bit of a rut but it’s all about the process and the inspiration so don’t be too hard on yourselves.
3. Lastly, it is true that the more you write, the better you become. If you read a poet’s first book and then compare it to their third, fifth, or seventh, you can see how much it has changed. There is always growth and usually as time goes on, the work gets more and more prolific. The tone of the book can also change dramatically, even though a poet may be writing in the same spaces. Let’s consider Crystal Williams’ first book, Kin, and her most recent collection, Detroit As Barn. You can see that she is still using the same themes and tropes of Detroit, Michigan as the triggering subjects in her work, but the way in which her poetic craft takes shape in both books differ and offer a different overall tone to her poems.
Kin
Detroit as Barn
Sporatic Writers
1. Tonya Olson is a poet extraordinaire and one I sincerely admire. In a 2016 Dodge Poetry Festival Q&A she mentioned that she would actually drop poetry for 1-2 months at a time and if at the end of the year she had 5 or 6 solid poems, she was happy. She is a poet that respects the process, and because of that, she allows herself to move at her own pace.
2. Furthermore, you may have many other artsy things on your plate. Many poets are also musicians, dancers, and/or painters. You can imagine how hard it’d be to do all of that in one day. So if you simply can’t get to poetry because of your activities, this is also fine. In a way, I can even see this working in your favor because the mind is constantly thinking in a creative manor as one art form will begin to feed into another. These two poets below are great examples.
Urayoán Noel
The real question you must ask yourself is why you are writing to begin with. It usually starts with the will to write and the realization that those with good intentions have things that we all need to hear. Still, you have to eventually evaluate your end-goal.
Are you in a high school or academic creative writing class? In a writing group? Are you a professional writer who wants to publish books and read to audiences? It’d be in your best interest to be writing everyday or at least several times a week. But then, if you are using poetry as a tool for the self, a cathartic exercise of mind and memory, you can write at your own leisure.
To end I will leave you this this metaphor I heard Kaveh Akbar discuss after a reading at the 2016 Dodge Poetry Festival. His metaphor used a bull and the cat. The bull wakes up every morning at 3AM by the farmer and grazes. He gets his plow put on and is taken out into the fields. There he plows and plows for 12-15 hours, continuously producing and continuously working, only pausing to graze. When the work is done, he finally retires. The cat on the other hand sleeps a lo0oo0o0ong time— 16 to 20 hours long. When the cat decides to stir awake, it will play and be active for the remainder of its day. In that time, it has just as much productivity as it needs.
We see here, that both animals are producing but at different paces. This is very similar to the way we write. While some of us work better scheduling our time to write and committing ourselves to producing consistently, others may work better when they just think producing is necessary. And even within these two styles, there are many ways to be the bull or the cat. So which one are you? Feel free to contemplate that and start a conversation below.
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