You want to be better at anything? Keep plugging away and don’t ever stop practicing, and that goes doubly so for writing. Why? It just does—filled as it is with nuance and expectation and alive right there in the heart of everything we do, say, hear, and make.

Writers write.

They just do. And you are almost certainly only a writer when you are writing: actively penning words onto the page, typing characters into a keyboard or brewing the thoughts in your brain for your next opportunity to do more writing. 

Writing can be messy. It can be scattered. It can be long or short, formal or stylistically chaotic. Writing can be words strung together in a notepad app, or traced with a lusciously thick felt-tipped marker on a wall. Writing can be private scribbles in a journal or annoying daily posts in a public website launched into the universe with no clear destination or audience.

Whatever it ultimately becomes, the writing itself is an action. To write is a verb. 

Writing is the act of filling the gaps between words. Writing is temporary and temporal. 

And you need to write always. Why?  If you need to ask then you are not one of us.

Because writers write.

Oh, I get it. You don’t have the passion or the time or the urge or the patience. 

That device in your hands is so great at capturing your attention and entertaining you with the ideas and thoughts of other people—or maybe now I should include algorithms and slop—that you can’t be bothered to use it to make something.

But writing is at the core of creativity. It is the uber-skill that shapes and refines all the others. 

Writing is the materialization of thoughts—reflective and critical, personal and communicative, coherent and scattered—upon the page.

Writing makes you better at evaluating yourself and whatever you do. 

Writing closes the loop and fills the gap and bridges the points of something you cannot articulate is missing in your soul until you start writing.

It’s not difficult.

Open any app that takes text: your notes, your word-processor, hell, write yourself an email… but write something. And then write some more. And keep writing after that. It will improve you in ways you cannot fathom until you’ve written enough to see it for yourself.

I drove the kid to the community recreation centre this evening and, if only because I pulled a muscle in my back and need to rest it, I brought my computer instead of my own gym gear.

Usually I come to this building to literally work out my body. I run on the track or do some cycling training on the bike, or do a few sets on the weight machines. I’m not claiming to be a gym nut of any kind, but I do a lot of thinking (and even writing) about the work it takes to keep your body—lungs, heart, muscles, and all of it—in shape.

Tonight, I’m sitting here with my computer doing some writing.

I just dropped another five hundred words into my work-in-progress novel.

Now I’m writing this little ditty. 

I’m working out my creativity tonight, doing reps on the keyboard, which is arguably an important part of keeping that kind-of but-not-really a muscle in shape.

I won’t claim to be breaking much of a sweat, but it’s hard work and dedication just the same.