What I Learned In Boating School Is ...

Why I started writing every day.

There’s an episode of Spongebob where Mrs. Puff decides she’s done teaching Spongebob how to drive, so she asks him to write a ten word essay for “extra credit work” in order to pass, and she even gives him the first seven words: What I learned in boating school is … blankety, blankety, blank. 

But he can’t handle the pressure. Mrs. Puff flies into a rage. She passes him anyway before thinking better of it, and after her attempt at hijacking his boat so he can’t cause any harm goes awry, the two spend a night in the Bikini Bottom jail, Spongebob relinquishes his license, and she’s stuck in the eternal purgatory of teaching that sponge how to drive.

Like a lot of episodes of Spongebob, this reminds me of my own life. I am in a similar “boat” (get it?) as him at the moment. Start a Substack, they said. You have so much to write about, they said.  (“they” is just myself, by the way. I’m the only person who told me to do this.)

I thought I had a lot to say about writing, but it all went out the window the second I stared at the blank page. Everything I know about writing is … maybe nothing? It feels like nothing.

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Here’s something I know about writing: Yesterday I walked away from both the revisions on my novel and this post thinking pretty bad writing day, but oh well. I’ll try again tomorrow. 

What I did not do was assume the bad day was indicative of a larger issue with my writing skills, and then treat myself to a little thought spiral down the rabbit hole of maybe I can’t do this after all.

This might be the most valuable lesson I’ve learned about writing. Or at least, I’m trying to learn it. I’m not sure I’ve really gotten the message yet. Maybe I should call this Everything I Should Know About Writing instead.

You see, I tend to think that whatever is going on at any given moment is the way my life is going to be forever. This has gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years. If I have a good day, break out the confetti, I have finally figured out the secret to life and I will never suffer again. If I’m sad, I might as well curl up in a ball and lay there until I expire, because what’s the point? 

This is not a sustainable way to live your life, and it turns out it’s not a sustainable way to write a novel, either.

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I wrote three drafts of one novel and two drafts of another between May 2023 and May 2024. Some mathematicians might even say that means I wrote five drafts in total. Up until then, I was very inconsistent with writing. I would write for a week or two, get discouraged when things weren’t going well, do something else, and eventually come back to writing before the cycle repeated itself. Sometimes I would write an entire first draft before I finished, took some time off, and then never finished a second draft.

(I did that fourteen times, actually. That’s fourteen manuscripts that never saw a second draft.)

I can tell you that on the days I got a lot of writing done, I was happy. But if I sat down and I wrote nothing that looked like it had any potential to be good, I would become pretty convinced it was time to give up. The good days had been a fluke. Probably some grand cosmic joke. Definitely not just the way things work for everyone. Have I heard nearly every writer I look up to say that this is the way things work for everyone? Yes. But I feel like I am probably the exception to this rule. If I have a bad writing day, it’s because God himself is telling me to stop writing or he’s going to strike me down. I’m special, damn it. 

But something clicked for me last year, and I got really consistent with writing, because I had the mind-boggling experience of having no bad writing days when I wrote a first draft in under a month. Seriously, every day I made progress on the novel, and my “worst” day was when I had to delete a few thousand words that didn’t work and rewrite a scene. The process was so smooth and enjoyable that it almost made me worry I might be having some sort of mental breakdown.

I didn’t mind it if I was.

In the second draft, things got a little finicky. I was finding a lot of things about the story that didn’t work, and I wasn’t sure how to fix all of it. I think if circumstances had been different, I might have thrown in the towel.

But in the twenty-six days I wrote the first draft, I had realized something invaluable: I am happier when I’m writing, and writing becomes easier to do when I do it every day. And in draft two, I realized even if I had several bad days in a row, I still felt better than on the days I didn’t write at all.

And besides being a great mood booster, writing consistently had another side effect: I was finally finishing second (and third) drafts. Now I’m on the fourth draft of this particular novel, and I have no plans to throw in the towel anytime soon.

You don’t have to write every day to be a writer, obviously. What works for me might not work for you at all. I don’t write every day, but I do write almost every day, and I’m extremely lucky to have the time to do so. And sure, on the bad days I still worry that maybe my luck has finally run out and I’m never going to write anything good ever again. But I sit down to write the next day, anyway. What else am I going to do? 

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I started this because I wanted to talk about writing, but I’ve been unsure of where to begin. I told myself I wasn’t going to hit publish until I had a bunch of perfectly polished posts written and ready to go. Like all of those cool kids who content batch! I am always admiring those people, mostly because they scare me with their ability to plan ahead. I just wrote down a list of dinners I want to make this week and I am already feeling winded. I start books without outlines and then whine and moan when I get stuck in act two and finally have to plan where things are going. I don’t think trying to plan out engaging content months in advance is in the cards for me, although I remain hopeful for the future. 

But let’s be honest: this ain’t that serious. I want this to be a place where I talk about what writing is like for me, not a place where I try to write impressive thinkpieces in the hope that it’ll convince people I’m smarter than I am. Maybe sometimes I will sound thoughtful, or like I know what I’m doing. Rest assured, neither of those things are true. I don’t understand anything about writing. So this should be interesting!

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