Writing Habit

Copyright Nintendo

If you haven’t been writing enough and you think that it’s time to cultivate a writing habit, you should get started right away.  To change a habit, get a habit or improve something, you need 4 things.  Clear goals, feedback, reward and a start.  The same applies to writing.

Clear Goals

Know what you want to achieve.  If you want to pull a Stephen King and write 2000 words a day, do so.  If you want to make room for emergencies and busy days, set up a word count for the week.  Or you could write for a set time every day.  But make sure your goal is measurable, i.e. amount of words, amount of time.  Don’t just think that you will write every day.

Feedback

With this, I don’t mean people telling you if your writing is any good, I mean that you need feedback on the completion of your goals.  If you have a word count limit for day, get a word processor that can count your words.  Or if you have a time limit, get an alarm clock.  If your goal longer, such as words a week, set up a table or spreadsheet in which you calculate your total.

Reward

You can give yourself a reward every time you finish a goal (like watching TV after you finished your daily words), but with this, I’m specifically referring to the end-goal.  I.e. the reason why you’re doing this.  You need to ask yourself, why are you spending hours every day to write down things that you thought up?  Once you have that answer and it’s satisfactory, it will motivate you to come back every day.

Start

The key to forming a habit is to get started.  If you just keep planning and never start, you’ll never get anywhere.  So if you want to start a habit, start now.  If you don’t, you’ll just keep putting it off until never.  Go.  Start.  Now.

If you have these four ingredients in order, it shouldn’t be too long before you’ve gotten into a habit.

If you’re having trouble getting started, you might want to review your goals and make them easier.  Going from 0 to 2000 words a day is pretty tricky.  If you’re still having trouble, make the goal so easy that you cannot possibly come up with an excuse to skip it.  Make it, write for two minutes.  Still too hard?  Take a lesson from Zen Habits and make it 20 seconds.

Once you have the habit, you will get closer and closer to your reward.  And when you reach it, it’ll be worth it (if it’s even reachable…).

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Too Much Time

Copyright Namco.  Source

If you’re a writer and you don’t have a big sum of money in your bank account from a lotto win or sell enough books to cover the bills, chances are that you have to work for a living (or raise kids, which is, from what I’ve heard, more work than work).

Probably, if you fit into the above category, you’ve wished more than once that you had more time to write (rather than squeezing in some writing time before you go to bed or on your way to work).  As someone who’s had that, let me tell you, it’s not as wondrous as it may seem.

Before I go on with that, let me ask you this.  What would you say is the most important habit of a creative?

The answer of many (and a common agreement, I think) is solitude.  The ability to seclude yourself and use that time to reach into yourself and pull something out.  Being alone makes you think.  Maybe another important aspect is that you should be doing nothing.  A writer once said that you should spend four hours every day either writing or doing nothing (writhing on the floor counts as that, apparently).  You need time to think.

I’m sure you’ve all noticed that grieving people often like doing things in order to stop thinking about things.  You, as a creative, need to do the opposite.

Now, to my other point.  I spent around a year trying to find a job while studying part time.  The idea was to write during this gap of time.  I did.  Write, I mean.  But it was hard.  I struggled to find good ideas and spent hours pacing.  At the end of the day, I would have maybe 1500 words.  Which is not bad, but in my mind, because I’ve spent an alleged 8+ hours on it, it was pretty bad.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a professional writer who spends all day writing (except maybe John Creasy).  They use a part of the day (say, morning ‘till noon) to write, and the rest to answer mail, play with the kids and/or read.

When you have too much solitude, the silence becomes deafening, and you can’t hear a thing the world/your muse/your imagination is trying to tell you.

Ever since I’ve gotten a job, I’ve been pretty busy, between that and studying (and maintaining my three weekly blog posts), I haven’t had much time to write.  But ideas flow more freely and everything seems better to me.

When your mind is spinning with ideas and experiences, your solitude has meaning.  If I can make an allegory, weekends don’t have the same yay-factor when you don’t have to go to work or school during the five weekdays.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think it makes sense.

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Set up a Routine

Do you have a specific time that you devote to writing? Or do you just write whenever you get the time?

Setting up a routine allows you to automate certain actions, freeing you from having to think about it. But more importantly, routines creates expectations for your mind about what to do next and can help you get writing done.

Writing every day is one of the best pieces of advice there is. Not only does it allow you to get in constant practice, it also lets you create a habit. Ergo, every day – after you’ve made a routine – your mind will switch into creative mode (hopefully) in preparation for the creative work that it expects to come.

If you don’t have the time to devote specific times in your life to writing, and you just cram in as much as possible in the spaces in between, you can achieve pretty much the same effect through use of a ritual of kinds.

Let’s say that you finally get time to yourself. Before you start writing, do a series of things that you will repeat every time before starting to write. Say, making yourself a cup of coffee and putting on a specific playlist or lighting a candle. Anything, as long as its unique. Sharing the ritual, per se, would lower the effect when you need it. So create a unique sequence that you can learn to associate only with writing.

In the same manner, you can also create a bad routine. Say you get into a routine of skipping your writing for the day. By doing that, you are conditioning yourself to not write. Obviously, this is not a desired result unless you’re a recovering writaholic. If you realise that you made such a routine, you have to consciously break it and create a new one (preferably one where you write more) in its place.

In the end, a routine can help you a lot, especially if you have a thought-demanding day job that distracts your mind from thinking in creative ways or whatever the case may be.

What routines do you use to get your mind into a “writing mode”? Or are you just permanently in that mode? I guess that’s the difference between the two types of writers that Charles Peguy mentions: “A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.”

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