As much as I love the ‘just write’ motto, I have to say that there are times when it could be detrimental to your writing career.
I mean, it is good advice if you’re the type of writer that prefers dreaming over actual writing. Just write and you’re bound to pick something up along the way. That’s how I learned most things in life too.
That is why I feel ‘just write’ has its merits. Especially since most of us writers tend to err on the side of avoidance.
So why, then, does ‘just write’ not apply to your craft sometimes? Read on to find out.
1. You’ll end up with unusable words
The thing about ‘just write’ is that you can write anything and call it practice. This includes your journals, morning pages, tweets, and even texts.
And while this mantra does alleviate the stress we often associate with writing, it also lacks the actual content where craft is concerned.
I know this because if you factor in my morning pages, journals, and word ‘sketches’ I do every day, I easily put out 2,000 words on the daily. But do they ever make it into any of my official work? Nope.
There is a purpose to writing words you’ll never use, and that’s to get your first million words out before you can get to the good stuff.
But you know what they say: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. So sometimes you need to write with an end goal in mind.
2. You’ll end up with a false sense of security
Building upon the above point, it’s easy to ‘just write’ your way into a future of unpublished works.
After all, you can adopt the Murakami lifestyle of writing for hours and running 10 kilometres every day and still end up on your deathbed wondering where all your effort went.
This is because on paper, sticking to a writing routine would be the boss thing to do. Because who doesn’t love a disciplined writer? It doesn’t help that other wordsmiths tend to laud anyone who can put out a four-digit word count every day.
But that’s like drinking every night and telling yourself you’re not an alcoholic because you don’t drink during the day. It’s all just justifications.
So while ‘just writing’ may feel cool, it could actually be detracting you from your actual work.
3. You forget what it’s like to perform
When I dole out the ‘just write’ advice, I also like to include ‘write like no one’s reading’. And on the whole, I’ve found this to be a good way to get over the self-consciousness that comes with staring at a blank page.
But do you really want to spend your entire writing career just writing for yourself? Are you really okay with not sharing your work with anyone else?
Because writing is a performance, after all. And every performer needs an audience.
Thing is, ‘just write’ takes away the performance aspect of writing. When you write just for the sake of writing, you don’t typically have a reader in mind. And if you do that long enough, you’ll soon forget what it’s like to care about the reader’s experience.
Which is why you have to write for an audience and put out your work somehow. It doesn’t matter if you participate in short story competitions or write lengthy posts on LinkedIn.
What matters is that you try to find an audience every once in a while.
4. You won’t get to explore your true self
One other piece of writing advice that I swear by is to never take someone else’s word as set in stone. Especially if it’s from a famous author.
Don’t use adverbs. Write drunk. Conduct a goat sacrifice to the writing gods.
They might sound cool at first, and you might be tempted to follow other writers’ advice without giving them a second thought. But they all work best only for one person: the one giving the advice.
That’s what happens if you take ‘just write’ too seriously too. You don’t get to discover who you are as a writer.
Maybe you prefer binge-writing and locking yourself away on the weekends. Or maybe you can only write when surrounded by trees. You’ll never find out what routine fits you best if you only follow the top hacks you find on Google.
Writing is like cracking a safe for the wonderful words stored within, and it’s up to you to find the unique combination to yours.
Sure, you can give the top writing hacks a go to see if they suit you, but what’s more important is that you experiment with what your conscience tells you to do as well.
5. You’ll neglect actual training
How do you get better at free throws? You practise more free throws.
What about handstand push-ups? You practise handstand push-ups.
Drawing pentagrams with goat blood? You get the drill.
Nobody tells you to ‘just play basketball’, or ‘just work out’, or ‘just join the occult’ if you’re trying to improve in the above skills.
And while writing is a creative art, it’s also possible to pursue it from a logical standpoint.
So if you’re having problems with descriptions, you can hone in on that and spend an entire day just describing things from different POVs. Maybe your problem area is dialogues, or maybe it’s pacing.
Thing is, you won’t get better at those specific abilities if all you do is ‘just write’.
All the writers I know don’t like the idea of writing as a trainable skill. They want it to remain a mystical art. Because in art, everything is an expression of self. So there’s no need to practise.
But nobody climbs Mount Everest by accident (I love this saying). Just as how nobody improves their writing purely by chance.
You need your ‘why’
There’s a type of worm named the Pine Processionary Caterpillar. And thanks to smart people like Jean Henri-Fabre, we now have a perfect analogy to sum up this post.
You see, the Pine Processionary Caterpillars have a tendency to follow the leader without question. And they do this with such single-mindedness that when Fabre arranged them in a circle, they just continued tailing the one ahead of them—for eight entire days—before dying their gruesome death.
Of course, I’m leaving out the other nuances of this experiment to suit my purposes, but let’s just end on this note: Like the caterpillars, you could ‘just write’ for years and still get nowhere in the industry.
Which is why you need to be realistic with your writing sometimes.
What do you wish to achieve through words? Is it to finish a novel? Then find a way to put down 80,000 words in a single story.
Do you want to find work in the industry? Then figure out what your potential employers are looking for and strive to become that person.
Or do you simply want to change people’s lives? Then start by trying to affect just one person.
Because sometimes writing isn’t just something you do for fun. Sometimes it’s a matter of writing with purpose.
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Stuart Danker 
I’d love to hear your thoughts!