Do writers have to write every day?
There are many myths about this, with people citing all sorts of people to somehow demonstrate that writers need to write every day. Margaret Atwood once advised young writers to do that, even though she doesn't. Samuel Johnson certainly didn't.
Billy Collins is an example of why writers don't have to write every day. Here he is being refreshingly frank about how he writes:
There’s a lot of waiting around until something happens. Some poets like David Lehman and William Stafford set out on these very willful programs to write a poem a day. They’re extending what Catullus said about “never a day without a line.” But most poets don’t write a poem a day. For me it’s a very sporadic activity. Until recently, I thought “occasional poetry” meant that you wrote only occasionally. So there’s a lot of waiting, and there’s a kind of vigilance involved.
This is an area where a more formal research analysis is needed. Writers are studied mostly by writers and historians, rather than economists and statisticians. I suspect there are many more myths to be busted.
Of course, you may decide to call vigilance writing, but that would be to miss the point entirely.
The interview is an example of the Fitzgerald Rule:
I have a memory of the first time I was inspired to write. I was in the back of my parents’ car on the FDR Drive in New York City. I was about ten. I was in the backseat and I saw a sailboat on the East River. I remember asking my mother for a pencil or a pen, and I wrote something down... But my first real book wasn’t published until I was in my forties. A late bloomer. I stayed kind of underground, never took a workshop, never associated much with other poets.
And then there's this.
At the age of eighteen I sent some poems to Poetry. I got a note back from Henry Rago encouraging me—not to send again, mind you, but to continue writing. I was so in the dark, I thought maybe everyone got a letter like this. Maybe they did. But the next time I sent anything to Poetry was almost twenty-five years later.
As Martin Amis says, all teenagers are writers. The writers are simply the ones who don't stop. Collins also thinks that, '“finding your voice” is a false concept.'
The whole interview offers great value. The section on paradelles is hilarious.