Do you really need to write every day?

[Lazybones]

I think it's more important to get into the writing habit. I don't write every day, but I find that when I'm not writing at all for a few days at a time my mood sours somewhat. I'm a firm adherent of Malcolm Gladwell's theory that it takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to get really good at something. That's a lot of writing. I have five novels I wrote in grad school and about 2 million words of fanfics that I posted on a gaming forum, before I started my "serious" writing (i.e., the stuff I've self-published over the last few years). I go back and look at those early novels sometimes in the hopes of being able to polish them up and publish them, but they're just too raw. But I would not have gotten to my current level without having written them.

There are gifted writers who just start out good, and can publish in their teens/early 20s, but I do believe that for most of us it does take years and years of work before you can really make it as a writer.

[AbigailF]

I certainly don't write everyday. As someone else said, it's good to keep going when you have a project unfolding, if just to keep some flow in it. But once I finish something, it takes a good week or two to write anything at all. I think whatever works for the writer, works for the writer. My memory is way too short to have a weekly word quota!