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What Is a Good Writing Day Really?

Redefine what you think about good or bad writing days

Diana Gabaldon, author of the Outlanders series, once wrote “A good day is any day when you get words on the page. A bad day is when you don’t.”

This is true and valuable to remember because, as most authors know, we tend to have more bad days than we’d like. We have busy workdays. Children get sick or need rides to baseball practice, or they need to eat — imagine that. The toilet gets stopped up. The dog gets sprayed by a skunk.

With each unexpected issue or our daily challenges, we can choose to sit at our desks and write, or we can become overwhelmed and not write.

The choice is ours.

Good writing days

Let’s focus on the good days. I agree with Gabaldon that a good day is when you get words on a page. We need to stop expecting life to be perfect before we can write because those days are rare.

Gabaldon also didn’t say they had to be good words. When we become obsessed with writing well and refuse to write unless we can produce flawless writing, what tends to happen is that we don’t write at all. Writers can’t wait until obstacles disappear, when our desk is clean, when the children are behaving like angels, when life runs like a dream. That only happens in movies…

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