Writing Schedules and All That Stuff
As a writer, it’s one thing to be able to string your words together to form a coherent sentence and another to be able to get people to read your work.
Growing up, I’ve always known that I wanted to be a writer; my dream jobs went from novelist to journalist, to marketer (the role I’m now in). Yet my writing style has almost always been frantic and unkempt. As a result, my education was low, and I struggled with the necessary spelling and grammar for longer than I care to admit. But I worked hard, I read books, I planned ideas, and I looked for ways to grow continually. Instead of robotic sentences with little to no emotion, I’m an (I hope) chatty writer. My work feels mature and confident. But that did not come naturally.
The skill of being a good writer is not inherited or bless upon you at birth. You can be creative from a young age — you can have characters and plotlines floating around your head from the age where you were old enough to play with dolls (or action men, I don’t judge). Or you can be like most modern writers today and choose to spend your life making experience and cultivating your own real-life stories. But the task of stringing all those seemingly incoherent thoughts together in a well-structured story or article takes years of graft.
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Since the UK’s third lockdown, I’ve been looking at ways to further expand my horizons and become a more developed writer. I journal daily, the blog on weekends, and try to revive my Medium with entries. At the age of 22, I understand that writing can be whimsical, but it can’t be done on a whim if you want to view it as a profession. A clear structure and goal need to be set in place from the get-go.
When I don’t have much of a writing structure, bar morning journal entries (which keep me sane), you’ll often find me curled up at my desk until 11:30–midnight with a rum or whisky. It doesn’t hinder my creativity, nor does it hinder my ability to string together sentences. But I’m well aware that I could succeed in my writing goals if I put together a proper writing schedule and stuck to it.