I listened to a podcast this morning (WriteNow ep. 65) that included some words about how romantic and perfect writers try to make their writing life look online. We’re onto you Instagram!!

The context of the comment was that the images we see via the #amwriting hashtag on social media are the ideal, most of the time, and not a true representation of the reality of the hard work of getting words out of our brains and onto a page in a book on a shelf in a bookstore or – even better – into the hands of a real live human reader. Those images depicting patios shaded by wisteria and a pretty notebook sitting next to a perfectly chilled glass of Pinot Grigio should not be used to judge our own writing life.

I would like to suggest they shouldn’t even be something we aspire to. The only measure of how well we are doing in our writing practice should be how many words we have written on the page or saved on the laptop at the end of the day.

Some days, I am able to write those words in a cute coffee shop with a cup of the best coffee on the planet next to me. (Like today! Huzzah!) Other days – MOST DAYS – I do it in my messy office, wearing mismatched socks and a shirt I’ve worn for three days.

Some days, I do what I think so many other writers are doing when they share those perfectly composed images. Procrastinating. Not writing at all, actually. Dreaming the dream of the mythical writing life. Choosing the perfect filter for the perfect heart in our coffee cup, rather than choosing to kill off a favorite character or deciding if our first ten chapters are good enough to salvage or bad enough to feed to the compost pile.

But guess what? That’s part of the writing life too. Here’s a challenge: take a picture of that compost pile and the mismatched socks and post that.

Then, just keep writing.