Naps are good for you.

The end.

Your body often tells you things you ignore and continue pushing it, to keep working. Keep writing. Keep sticking to that word-count goal, or page-goal, or whatever goal you have.

This is counterproductive to your writing.

Your mind sits in your body—inside your head—and it’s nothing more than a bunch of fat, blood, and nerve cells. And other tissues the names of which I don’t know. And if’s missing something, it won’t functioned properly, no matter how much you try to force it (you know that when you force your writing, it’s usually shit, and you have to re-write it anyway, so why waste time?).

Listen to your body. Listen carefully, and do what it tells you.

This is my rough calculation, based on about six years of writing full-time. 

Every little interruption, be it checking your email, or Twitter, or answering the phone, or the door, or talking to someone in person, kicks you out of the concentrated writing mode, and it will take you 30-40 minutes to get back into it.

This is good one to tell to people who view your writing as a hobby, or as something that will never make you money, or who diminish it in some other, unreasonable and inappropriate way (because anyone condemning any art-making is totally unreasonable and inappropriate):

Tell them: “I do the service that will improve the world.”

Writing will result in people reading your work, and people reading your work will result in them talking to you. Even if it’s only friends and family. But of course, like all of us, you dream of lots of people reading your work. 

By the act of writing, whether you want to or not, you open yourself up to scrutiny and criticism, as well as praise and admiration. Interacting with your readers will take time, and that time will be taken out of your writing time.

How to balance it?