Conversation is writing

There's so much good content in everyday conversations.

I'll be texting someone and I'll look at the last few lines as if they were verse and it makes a pretty good poem.

You're at a bar with your friend and they're telling you about something they're going through and it could be a documentary.

You're on a Zoom meeting with a coworker and you accidentally come up with a business idea.

You're constantly having a conversation with yourself in your head.

Sometimes people tell me they're not writers and it's always B.S.

Every human being is a writer because we all talk and write in our daily lives.

Spoken and written language is how we communicate with each other. It's just how we evolved.

So, the problem for a writer should never be a lack of content.

Every word you speak and write in your everyday life is content. And that's not including the words you hear and read from others.

The skill is sifting through it all. 99% won't be good enough for publishing. You need habits, methods, and tools to capture the 10% that is good, then you spend time at the desk whittling down to the 1% that is great.

Generally, it's a shift from writing being something you have to carve out time for to writing being something that just happens in the natural flow of your everyday life.

Let's compare the advice of two famous writers ...

“This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” — Neil Gaiman

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.” — Will Self

There's this idea that writing is pouring yourself a big cup of coffee and sitting down at your desk to stare at a blank doc on your computer screen, but it doesn't have to be that hard.

I've even read advice from authors about strapping yourself to the chair with a belt, locking yourself in a room, and setting a timer for the minimum amount of time you need to sit at the desk.

My own writing style is more "carry a notebook" than "sit down at the keyboard."

Granted, it depends on your form of writing. You can write a poem or any other short form pretty much anywhere. For novels and longer forms, you probably need to be at a desk for a while to keep everything organized.