The Importance Of Writing: The Artist's Way

As a writer, your brain can get to be a pretty cluttered place. Characters clammer around and chatter all day. Works in progress and burgeoning ideas vie for attention. Daydreams and brainstorms rise and fall from the surface of consciousness like a swell at sea. Without proper vent, the authorial mind quickly becomes a frustratingly crowded place, and it can become hard to extract a single, linear thought from the teeming mess. Distraction and dismay, unfortunately, do not a productive writer make.

Desperation can be beaten back, however, with dedication. While the exact word counts vary, the majority of today’s most prolific authors agree that writing at least one thousand words a day can help sort out the chaos of the writerly mind and pave the way not just for a healthy, successful writing life.

But how?

First and simplest, writing at least one thousand words a day gives you a chance to get the garbage out. As big- and small-time authors alike will share, so much of what holds writers back …show more content…
While Benson’s website advocates for at least three pages a day, rather than a baseline of four, the philosophy is the same. The site is the product of Benson’s foray into The Artist’s Way, the opus supreme on creativity by Julia Cameron, in which Cameron herself advocates for a practice of penning at least seven hundred and fifty words each day. Benson decided to give it try and soon found that unlike many other a supposed writing trick, dedicating a portion of his day to sitting down and spinning out his three pages’ worth of word count did actually bolster his writing endeavors as a whole. “It's about getting it all out of your head, and is not supposed to be edited or censored in any way,” Benson explains in the introduction to his website. “[...] Over time, I've found that it's also very helpful as a tool to get thoughts going that have become stuck, or to help get to the bottom of a rotten