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.