How to Get Back in the Habit of Writing Every Day
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3 pages every day is 1,095 pages per year
This morning I woke up at 6:00, brewed my coffee, and wrote three pages of fiction by hand. It was my first time writing fiction in over a month. I felt like shit, not just because it was early but because I knew that If I had kept up this habit, the novel I’m working on would be done by now.
Getting back to work on the novel means accepting that today is all I have. I can either show up and do my best or wallow over work that didn’t get done.
Anyone who’s read my posts will know I’ve struggled with this before. That’s another thing that makes me feel like shit. I‘m like a junky saying “I’m done for good this time” for the fiftieth time.
I started this year with CreativeLive’s 28 To Make challenge and posted daily for a month. In one of my last posts from that challenge, I said I would stick with a daily posting practice after the challenge is over. I’ve posted maybe once or twice since then… If I had stuck with my daily posts I’d have written 113 posts since I stopped.
So without claiming to have figured it out or to have found a routine that sticks, here are a few reasons I’m getting back to work today and will try again tomorrow.
The Compound Benefits of Daily Writing
There is a simple formula for getting things written.
Step 1: Commit to a manageable daily writing quota.
Step 2: multiply that effort through daily practice.
3 pages every day is 1,095 pages per year.
If you don’t have time for that, you still have time to draft a novel every year:
1 page every day is 365 pages per year.
“90% of Everything is Crap”…Those are Good Odds
Nothing keeps people from writing like perfectionism and the fear of writing something awful. But if you do enough writing, you have nothing to fear from writing rubbish, even if most of what you write is rubbish.
Let’s say your rubbish rate is 90% and just 10% of your work doesn’t suck. That might sound depressing until you think about it in terms of a…
