Stop me if this sounds familiar

“Yes Stephen, I’ll write every day”… (shuffles off and continues to write once a week)

“Yes Neil, I will finish my WIPs”… (starts yet another short story to add to the overflowing folder of half-finished work)

“Yes Tolkien, I’ll start with a map. Anything else would land one in confusion and impossibility”… (continued to write without a map and gets, surprisingly, confused)

Advice for budding writers is not hard to find. From Stephen King to Margret Atwood, Judy Bloom to William Zinsser, authors new and old, spanning genre and medium, have been telling us how to follow in their footsteps for years.

No matter how you choose to learn, Masterclass, SkillShare, writing seminars, or books on the craft, we are all really asking the same thing:

“Tell me how you do what you do, so I can learn to do it too.”

But there is a difference between hearing a piece of advice, and actually listening to it.

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Time for a skiing analogy that nobody asked for.

During everyone’s first season in the ski industry, whether you’re an instructor, a lifty, a patroller, or a sales rep, everyone, without exception, gets better at skiing. People who have struggled for years getting off chairlifts and steered clear of anything steeper than a blue run are suddenly sending black diamonds and ripping groomers like nobody’s business.

And it’s not because you spent most of your savings on a rad new pair of skis. Or because that instructor gave you some pointers on the chairlift. It’s not even because you finally got a pair of ski boots that fit.

It’s because you’re doing it every day.

Whatever your base starting skill, if you do something every day you will get better. That’s a fact. Even the most innately stubborn minds will learn muscle memory from repetitive movements, will learn from their mistakes and build confidence through trial and error. After a while, you’ll hit a plateau, and you’ll need conscious effort and training to move past it. But during that first season, when you’re skiing harder and faster than ever before- you’ll feel like a god.

And this is not a phenomenon restricted to snowy mountain peaks.

If you do anything every day, you will get better.

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I have written more in these last six months than I have in the last six years. That’s not a brag, or an exaggeration.

I used to complete a story maybe once a year and spend the rest of the time playing with half-formed ideas spread across a myriad of journals. I would have periods of productivity when I would write non-stop for days, but then the spark would fade. I’d put down the pen, only to pick it up in a few weeks when the urge to write hit again.

This is not the writing process of an accomplished writer. At least none I’ve ever heard of.

When I decided to pursue a career as a freelance writer, I knew this process had to change. I needed to write more frequently. I needed to write with purpose. I needed to stop waiting for inspiration to appear and start learning how to make it appear.

When I started a blog last year it would serve a dual purpose. Firstly, it would be a portfolio, a place to showcase my work to the world. Secondly, and more importantly, it would force me to write more often. To start with, this was enough. Just like when I started snowboarding for work, my writing improved simply by simply doing it more often. By practicing the skill more regularly and putting in the hours.

But something still wasn’t right.

I was still writing when I felt like it. When I wanted to. When the inspiration hit me. I would spend hours writing, sometimes days, words flowing onto the page and reminding me why I loved it. But I still had days without picking up a pen. Days when the task of writing seemed too much for my frazzled brain. When I told myself I wasn’t feeling creative, that I should wait until inspiration came to me from some fantastical outside source.

I came to writing when I wanted to, when it suited me.

Something had to change.

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Enter: Ann Handley

I picked up a copy of Everybody Writes last year, and since then, it has sat untouched on my bookshelf, nestled neatly between On Writing and The Elements of Style (I categorize my bookshelf by genre, subcategorized by how much I like the author. Good luck finding anything without my help).

One day, when the urge to do anything other than write was strong, I picked up this invitingly large book and decided to give it a whirl.

I wasn’t two chapters in before Handley reiterated a point I had heard a thousand times before.

“The key to being a better writer is to write”

This is not new advice.

Stephen King has been telling us this for years. Any writing professor worth their salt will quote this on day one. I even have a Neil Gaiman poster above my writing desk that starts with the same simple statement:

“Write. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down”

I look at this poster every day. Have moved it with me from house to house. Displayed it proudly wherever I set up my collection of journals and pot of multicolored Papermate pens. I’ve heard this advice echoed by a thousand different writers, quoted and requoted in countless writing courses, but I never actually stopped to listen. Never took this simple, overused, over-memed message, to heart.

I don’t know what made this time different. Perhaps it was the spring sunshine. Or the shiny new journal on my desk just waiting to be used (Never underestimate the allure of fancy stationery.)

Or perhaps it was that Handley drove home the point by comparing writing to other life habits we often let slip.

“Spending 5 hours on a Saturday writing isn’t nearly as valuable as spending 30 minutes a day every day of the week” “Habits practiced once a week aren’t habits at all. They’re obligations. If you’re doing something once a week, it’s probably only a matter of time before you stop doing it altogether”

Jeff Goins

Whatever it was, this time something clicked.

I opened up a neat new journal, cracked the spine, skipped the first page (because who writes on the first page), and started writing. Pen to paper. Whatever I was thinking, whatever sparked my curiosity. And I told myself, this time, I would stick to it.

So far it’s been just over a week. Writing something. Anything. Everyday.

And the crazy thing is

It’s already made me a better writer.

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What most people don’t know about working on a ski hill is that sometimes, it sucks.

“Oh, you have the most amazing job. You must love every minute of it”.

And yeah, some days are great. Skiing fresh powder before the lines of tourists and bombing down cliffs in the bluebird sun. You can’t beat it.

But some days, it’s horrible.

When it’s minus 40°C and your hands go numb before the second run of the day. When you have to trek uphill for hours to break icicles off miles of rope lines. When it’s raining so hard that your jacket soaked through hours ago, but you still have to teach a crying 5-year-old how not to fall over.

These are the days you don’t want to be skiing. The days you would give anything to go inside, take off your boots, and call it a day. But you can’t. It’s your job. And no matter how hard you whine and complain, you find yourself putting on your gear, stomping out to the chairlift, and making your way up the hill.

That is how you really learn to ski. How you learn to ski in fog, when you can’t see the ground and have to sense feel your way down the hill. How you learn to ski on ice, when even the slightest movement can put you on your ass. And how you learn to ski in a blizzard, when you’re goggles are frozen over and you can’t see 5 feet in front of you. It isn’t fun. It makes you rethink your career choices. But by the end of the day, you’re one hell of a better skier than when you started.

Why am I talking about skiing again?

Because the same is true for writing.

If you only ever do it when the conditions are perfect, when the sun is shining and your brain is brimming with creativity, you’re never going to get better. You need to turn up on the bad days. The days when your brain is fog, when you can’t string a sentence together and you feel like you’ll never write again. You have to turn up, open your book, (or your laptop, or whatever you use to write) strap on your boots, and get the work done.

Writing, like anything, is a skill. It’s not something one either can or can’t do. It’s an art form learnt. A skill honed and perfected through practice and perseverance. The only way to do it is to do it. Do it over and over again, every day, until your movements become fluid. Until your muscles know what to do without you having to tell them.

Writing only when you feel like it is the same as skiing in the sun. It’s easy, it’s fun. It’s like floating on clouds and spinning magic with your words. Everybody writes. Everybody has good days when the words fall perfectly into place. The hard part comes on the days when they don’t.

You’ll learn more by forcing something out on a bad day than by writing a masterpiece on a good day. Why? Because no one knows what makes a good day. No one knows the exact formula for creative genius. A good day is a unicorn, beautiful when it’s around, but teaches us nothing about where it came from or how to get it back.

On a bad day, you have to work for it. You have to pull every word from the stone. Force yourself to think, rethink, edit, and restructure. You have to work to find the magic you once knew. There is a reason we learn through trial and error, not trial and success. Do something right, that’s brilliant. You’ve learnt how to do it right that one time. Learning ten thousand ways not to make a light bulb, that’s where the real progress happens. That’s how you hone a craft. Not by doing it when it’s easy, but by doing it when it’s hard.

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The key is to write. Write every day. Every. Single. Day.

I know you’ve heard this advice before, but this time, you’re actually going to do it.

Even if it’s a few sentences while you’re downing your morning coffee, or rushed over lunch while waiting for Starbucks to grill your panini. Put pen to paper. Even a few sentences is enough to get your muscles working. Get your brain turned on.

Show up. Every day. No excuses.

Push through the days when you don’t want to write, when you don’t have time, or don’t feel inspired. Force yourself to get something on the page.

Most likely, once you’ve silenced your whining, once you’ve made it up the mountain, you’ll find the beauty in the fog. The magic in the rain. The words you thought were eluding you will start flowing, start fixing themselves into lines that shine a little brighter. The inspiration you were waiting for will peek its head around the corner and sneak up behind you while you’re not looking.

And when you come in from the rain, soaked to the bone and stiff from shivering, you’ll be a better writer because of it.