For those of you who do writing as a profession or a hobby, how often do you write?
I write literally every day. I’m a member of a few online writing roleplaying groups.
I work on my novels every day. When I can’t actually type them into the computer, I’m plotting out the next scene.
Define “write”.
I spend some time replying to posts, here or on Facebook, nearly every day. To the annoyance and dismay of some, these are often full-blown essays, because that’s the kind of response my writer’s mind tends to conjure up when I read someone’s post.
I blog weekly. Those are usually newspaper-column length.
I haven’t worked on “writing a book” since I finished my second book in August 2020, unless you count subsequent editing rounds (cleanup of typos, cleanup of unclear phrases, specific language tweaking stuff). When I am in “book write mode”, it gets daily attention the same way that whenever I’m not doing something else I’m probably reading whatever book I’m currently reading, but instead of that I’m writing my own. It’s fun and entertaining and I don’t have to set goals or limits, either one.
I’m the editor of a small town weekly newspaper and the assistant editor of our corporate sister daily paper located the next town over. I write around a dozen bylined stories a week between the two papers along with my weekly personal column. It’s a lot, but much of it is by the numbers coverage of local boards or events with a few features thrown in to keep it interesting.
The kind of sad thing is that I rarely write for pleasure anymore. I find that doing it for a living makes it hard to get into that other headspace for fiction writing or poetry which I once loved to do.
I haven’t written much at all since the baby was born (summer '20). Before that I wrote almost every day, probably for 1-2 hours.
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, 1845:
For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.
I’m a lawyer. I write every day, on briefs and opinions. In the evening, I write on Wikipedia. I sometimes take off from Wikipedia and write a legal article. I write all the time.
Right now, 4-5 hours a day and its wonderful!