Before you can master the art of writing, you first have to master the habit. Whether you want to write professionally or as a hobby, the best way to build your skills is to write every day. Read on to learn how to start a daily writing habit.
Table of Contents
How daily writing improves your life
Greater efficiency
When you write every day, you have the opportunity to experiment with different story ideas and try more writing styles. This exploration makes it easier to find what kind of writing you enjoy the most and what fits best with your interests and personality.
The more you write, the more efficient your writing becomes as you improve your process. You learn if you work better from an outline or writing by the seat of your pants. You learn how to develop your ideas into complete pieces. You build focus and endurance, write faster, and write for longer periods.
More content
You won’t write a new best seller every day. Some of the content you create will be great, some will be terrible, but all of it will have value. Writing terrible content helps you improve your skills. Middle of the road content gives you material for blog articles, guest posts, podcast scripts, newsletter articles, and a thousand other things. The rare gem will give you the confidence you need to keep going.
Stronger confidence
New writers often suffer from chronic feelings of inadequacy. Building a daily writing habit will help you feel like a “real writer”. When people ask what you have been working on, you will always have a new piece or a recent accomplishment to discuss. Daily writing is the quickest way to complete a book. Completing a book will boost your confidence in your skills. Looking over at your bookshelf and seeing your name on a cover will remind you of how much you can accomplish by investing a little time each day.
How do you make yourself write every day?
First, stop asking that question. Any time you approach a task as something you have to force yourself to do, you are already doomed to fail. If a goal feels like a burden, you will soon resent it and look for excuses to avoid doing it. Never think of writing as an obligation. You spend most of your day working at your day job, taking care of your family, and doing household chores. Getting to sit down and create a story is your reward.
Examine your priorities. You already want to write, or you wouldn’t be reading this. So rather than “how do I make myself do this?”, a much better question is, “Do I want to write more than I want to do other things?”
Many of the ways we spend our free time are actually poor imitations of the things we actually want. My days used to be eaten up by Minecraft. I wasn’t actually playing the game. I was wandering around aimlessly, marveling at the blocky mountains, waterfalls, and canyons. The game was fun, but what I was actually craving was exploration. Once I came to this realization, I left Minecraft behind and took up hiking. Exploring a real wilderness is a far more satisfying activity.
Whenever something distracts you from your goal, ask yourself if it is really as satisfying and meaningful as writing.Don’t spend your time exploring a video game map when you can use writing to create an entire world. Don’t waste your days watching forgettable television shows when you can write a novel that can be remembered forever. You only get one life. Spend it doing what really matters.
Five steps to a daily writing habit
Set aside your writing time
Reserve a regularly scheduled period as your writing time. Habits are much easier to build when you have time set aside on your schedule for them.
If possible, try to “habit chain”. Habit chaining is when you take an already established habit and use that as your cue to do the new habit. You probably already brush your teeth every night before bed. If so, you can habit chain by telling yourself, “Every night after I brush my teeth, I will write for one hour.” You could also use your regular morning cup of coffee, getting home from work/school, watching your favorite TV show, or anything that happens at the same time every day.
If you can’t find a time to schedule your writing, try time tracking. For a week, keep track of everything you do and what time you do it. Write down when you eat, when you sleep, when you drive somewhere, all of your activities. At the end of the week, go through your notes and search for anything that’s not absolutely vital. If an activity doesn’t meet some other need or obligation, get rid of it and replace it with writing.
As you go over your schedule, try to clear a long block. Writing for longer periods increases the odds of getting into a flow state or “into the zone”. However, that may not be possible for everyone. If you only have a few minutes here and there, that’s okay, too. Write on the bus, while you’re in line at the grocery store, while you’re on the treadmill at the gym, anywhere you can. They even make waterproof pads for writing in the shower!
Create your writing space
Plan where you are going to write. If you can, set aside an area of your home as your dedicated writing space. This space will help you get in the right frame of mind and stay focused on your task. It doesn’t have to be a private office, but it should be as quiet and distraction-free as possible.
Make your writing space as pleasant to be in as you can. Keep it clean, tidy, and organized. The more attractive a daily writing habit is, the easier it is to stick to. If your writing space is attractive and comfortable, you are much more likely to want to sit down and write. A messy writing space is a distraction. You want your mind on your task, not on picking up the clutter, dusting shelves, and sorting files. So keep it clean and keep your focus.
As you’re creating your writing space, keep habit chaining in mind. If you want to write every day after lunch, consider using your kitchen table as your writing space. After you finish your meal, you will already be there in your seat, ready to go. If you want to write every day after you brush your teeth… well, you probably don’t want to write in the bathroom, but you can always leave a reminder note on the mirror.
If your writing space is virtual, consider using a writing app with full screen mode that limits distractions like other browser windows. There are a variety of apps and browser extensions that will block time-sucking websites and games so you have nothing to do during your writing time but write.
If you live with other people, make sure they know when your scheduled writing time is. If your writing space is private, hang a “Writer At Work” sign as a reminder. If your writing space is in a shared room like the kitchen, ask the other folks in the house to not bother you when they see you with headphones, your laptop, or a notepad.
Sharpen your mental focus
Make removing distractions a part of your writing ritual. Set your phone on “do not disturb”. Turn off the TV. Put the cat outside. Get rid of anything that breaks your focus.
If there are some distractions you just cannot remove, you can learn to overcome them. Your ability to focus is just like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. One way to work out your concentration muscle is to meditate. Spending time each day in meditation will train your brain to focus for longer periods. Meditation is also a great way to clear your mind of stressors and unblock your creative juices.
Physical exercise also helps build focus. Spending time focused on a demanding physical task hones your ability to ignore distractions, both physical and mental. If you find yourself stuck while writing, a little exercise will get your blood flowing and your brain moving again.
Track your writing progress
To form a daily writing habit and make it stick, there has to be a reward for doing it. Some habits pay off right away, like a regular sleep schedule. Habits like writing take longer to pay off. That’s where progress tracking comes in. Progress tracking reminds you that you are improving and moving towards your goal. Each time you write down a new achievement, it gives your brain a burst of dopamine. Before you know it, you’ll be looking forward to working on your new habit every day.
You can track your word count per day, number of hours spent each week writing, or the number of pages completed per month. You can track by marking a wall calendar, or in a daily planner, or with a spreadsheet.
You can also track your editing, either in time spent or amount of text edited. Editing is just as much a part of the writing process as number of words written. Tracking your editing will keep you from having blank days on your writing calendar.
The exact way you do your tracking isn’t as important as the tracking itself. You can track anything, as long as you can see the number increasing and you keep getting that feeling of progress towards your goal.
Conquer your procrastination demon
If you got this far in the article, you may be thinking “This sounds easy! I’ll get started building a writing habit tomorrow. Or next week. Or eventually.” If you are a chronic procrastinator, I have good news for you: it’s not your fault.
Procrastination is a response to stress. We procrastinate because we want to escape the stressor making us feel uncomfortable. If sitting down to write feels stressful, we will naturally look for excuses to avoid it or to do something easy instead. You can conquer your procrastination demon by learning to recognize the stressors that make you want to avoid your goals. What is freaking you out? That stressor is the real problem. Procrastination is just the symptom.
If you really want to write, you have to be okay with it being difficult. You have to be okay with digging up painful memories. You have to be okay with that annoying voice in your head telling you “you suck”, “you will never be good at this”, “you should just stop”.
Sometimes you just need to get started. Huge goals can be intimidating and keep you from even taking the first step. If you’re having trouble getting started, you may need to set a tiny goal, like writing for five minutes or writing a single paragraph. When you have a small goal, you will have a harder time making up excuses to avoid it. It’s hard to say “I don’t have time” if your goal is to write for thirty seconds!
You don’t have to stop when you complete your goal. You probably will find that, once you get started, you won’t want to stop. You can write your daily paragraph and keep going until you run out of steam.
How much should you write every day?
A good goal to work up to is a thousand words a day. A thousand words is roughly three pages. That means you could write the first draft of a novel in around three months.
Don’t feel guilty if you aren’t there yet. Don’t expect to make a huge jump overnight. Focus on your progress. Just move the needle. Just write more than you did yesterday.
Making writing worthwhile
Writing every day is a huge step towards building your skills, but you can’t stop there. To make sure all this writing is really worthwhile, there are a few other steps you should take.
Learn the rules of writing
Learn the fundamental rules of grammar. While software is getting better at finding errors, you should not depend on it to fix all of your mistakes for you. You don’t have to be able to recite the parts of speech from memory or diagram a sentence blindfolded. You just need to develop an ear for good writing. You want to be able to hear when something sounds wrong, even if you don’t know exactly why. Good resources for learning about grammar include Grammar Girl, both the book and the podcast, and the books It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences and The Only Grammar Book You’ll Ever Need.
Learn the rules of storytelling, how to develop a character, outline a plot, create tension, and build a world. Learning the rules will help you learn when you can break them without breaking your story. Good resources include the Helping Writers Become Authors podcast, Stephen King’s On Writing, Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, and of course the website you’re reading right now.
If you master the rules of grammar and storytelling, that part of your writing process will function on autopilot, allowing you to focus on larger issues like developing your theme and your unique narrative voice.
Read stories
Good writers are invariably good readers. Reading will help you develop your literary ear and make it easier to identify flaws in your writing. Read books in your genre to learn the tropes and what it looks like when they are done well and done poorly. Read books outside of your genre to find ideas that can be thrown in a blender to create something unique.
If it’s been a while since you’ve read some quality fiction, writing can feel like a struggle. Your imagination needs resources to keep creating. Reading will give you a rich warehouse of powerful images, emotional moments, and compelling characters that you can draw upon to inspire your own creations.
Get feedback
Getting feedback from readers and other writers will help you learn what you do well and find places where you need to improve. Share writing with friends. Join a writer’s group. Go to open mic nights and read your stuff.
Positive feedback will help you build confidence and conquer your self-doubt. Even negative feedback, when it is offered as constructive criticism, can help you build your confidence. After all, it means your critics respect you enough to give you an honest appraisal of your writing.
Consistency means not giving up
The difference between a hobbyist writer and an author is consistency. If you want to be a serious writer, you have to treat writing like a job. When writing is your job, you have to show up and work. If you feel blocked, you write anyway. If you feel too tired, you write anyway. If you would rather watch a movie or go out drinking, you write anyway.
Whenever you feel like quitting, remind yourself why you’re doing this.
- “I am going to prove to my parents that my English degree wasn’t a waste of money.”
- “I am going to fill this bookcase with novels with my name on them.”
- “I am building a legacy that will outlive me.”
- “I want my children, grandchildren, and great-great-great grandchildren to benefit from my lifetime of wisdom.”
The more resistance you have to building a daily writing habit, the more powerful of a reason you will need. Whatever your reason, it will give you the strength to get through the hard times and the energy to keep going.
