Several years ago, I struggled with building a consistent writing routine. Every time I’d sit down to write, I’d either not have the words, or spend too much time on every sentence that I wrote. There came a time when my writing was painfully slow and frustrating.
I did not feel like writing because it began to feel like a chore. I did not have a daily writing routine. There was no routine to speak of and very little motivation to continue.
If this feels like what you’re going through, read on.
I began to seek out ways to build a daily productive writing routine so that my writing habit would stick and not push me off the track.
“Don’t give up. I don’t think any other advice works. Writing is one of those things where you just have to do it. There will be far more people to discourage you than to encourage you. The time never comes to you, the inspiration doesn’t come to you. You just sit down and do it.” – James Lee Burke
Ever wanted to write consistently and make it a daily practice?
Author Isaac Asimov was a prolific writer who wrote hundreds of books in his lifetime.
Well-known writer, James Scott Bell in his daily practice called Nifty 350, writes 350 words first thing every morning before anything else, and has produced a lot of work in all his years of writing and still continues.
How were these writers able to achieve such amazing goals?
When I decided I wanted better goals and to write consistently, I used several methods to make my daily writing practice stick.
Honing it to make the most of my time, energy, and creativity, to produce results, I realized I needed more than just one approach to tackle it.
What I discovered was a three-pronged approach to make a writing habit stick.
I’ve broken it down into a three-part series where I lay down the step-by-step process that I used to create an effective, sustainable, and productive daily writing routine and practice.
This is Part 1 of the daily writing practice series.
How to develop a consistent writing routine – Part 1
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Benefits of daily writing practice
Before we dive into the actual process, let’s take a moment to identify the benefits of daily writing practice.
What are the benefits that I’m talking about?
Why not just write when you feel like it?
Why not wait for the muse to show up before you show up at the writing desk?
Have you spent months agonizing over a project that you wanted to start and could never get off the ground?
Has it been painful to see several unfinished manuscripts lying around that have never seen the light of day?
If you answered yes to any or all of the above questions, then you know what I’m talking about.
A daily writing practice
- Builds discipline
- Helps a writer produce more content
- Provides a sense of accomplishment
- Makes one a prolific writer
- Provides a sense of overall well-being
A prolific writer feels confident, self-assured, productive, and gainfully engaged in what she does best – being creative.
A writer writes…
In real life, this aspirational goal seems pretty elusive.
But NOT if we use a system that gives us the most value in the least amount of time and with ease.
While these processes worked for me, and I’m sure it will work for a lot of you, you have to determine which parameters to tweak and where you are in your writing journey to derive the maximum benefit from this outline of thoughts and ideas.
Use some of the tips that I’ve provided to test and see if it works for you.
Ready?
Create a comfortable daily word count
The first step to creating an effective daily writing practice is to have a comfortable daily word count.
Let me repeat that again.
You start with a comfortable daily word count.
And in a moment, you’ll know why a comfortable count is of the utmost importance. To me, it comes first in this series of writing hacks.
My personal journey with writing began with writing short stories of 1500 words based on a monthly prompt.
It isn’t easy for a beginner writer to create a short story of 1500 words every month. Of course, when I had just started out, I struggled with the same issues, barely managing to finish the 1500-word story by the end of the month.
Sometimes, I wrote for other prompts, but the small goals always kept holding me back to shorter and more inconsistent writing.
If you’re currently using such haphazard writing practices, it can cause several pitfalls:
- Inconsistent daily writing – If you’re barely writing any new words every day, or spending most of your time perfecting the story by adding or deleting words, then you haven’t gained much over the course of every month.
- No planning and low targets – Not planning for higher word count targets or more stories, will lead to low output and low drive to produce more work.
- Lack of motivation – If you couldn’t write a story that month, you’d be disheartened and lack the motivation to do anything else.
And, all of this creates a cycle of failure.
So, when I decided to participate in Nanowrimo a few years later, I realized I had suddenly upped my word count goal by a huge scale.
Instead of writing 1500 words a month, my target was to write 1667 words a day.
If you haven’t heard of Nanowrimo, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, where you write 50,000 words in November. Broken down into a daily word count, it works out to 1667 words per day.
It helped to outline the story first before writing a single word and to keep writing without deleting a written word as I pushed on day after day to achieve that goal of 50,000 words that month.
But soon, the struggle got real.
1667 words a day was not an easy personal target on a daily basis.
Even though I finished the challenge that year, it was a very high daily target for me to achieve consistently.
I had to find a comfortable personal target for myself.
I emphasize the word personal, because it is very personal.
A word count target is highly personal.
Take the right action towards your daily writing practice
Find a PERSONAL daily word count target.
Having a low target like 350 or 500 words to begin with, gives you the confidence and motivation to finish the goal every single day.
We are talking about personal comfort. If it’s only 100 words a day, or a single sentence, so be it!
You have to find out what works specifically for you.
If you find that a target is too easily achievable, then increase it. If it’s too much, scale it down.
James Scott Bell talks about finding a comfortable word count and then adding 10% as your daily target so you’re a little above your comfort zone.
Test it out for a few days to see if it works.
And if it does, stick with it day after day.
Consistency is more important than a word count target.
Because consistency is what creates RESULTS.
Imagine writing 100 words per day for the next 365 days. You’d finish a novella of 36,500 words at that rate.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
From not having a daily word count at all, I started with a low target of 500 words per day.
After several months, I went up to 1000 words per day.
Some days, I found that I could sail past the target easily, even doubling it at times when I was in the flow. Other days I teetered around 600-800 words or so. Then, all I had to do was push myself through the last leg of a few 100 words more but that seemed doable.
This target was not achieved in a day. Plus, I still wasn’t able to stay consistent.
That’s when I began to see that a word count target alone was insufficient to keep up this practice on a daily basis.
That’s why another step was needed to be layered on top of this process to make it a successful consistent daily writing practice, which
I’ll get to in the next post.
Practice, practice, practice to improve your writing goals
If you want to find your comfortable daily word count target, pick any number and stick to it for at least 21 days.
If it seems rather too easy or tends to stress you out every time you sit to write, you’ll know that your target is not completely right for you and needs to change.
After you’ve stuck with your target for a few months/years, it would be a good idea to test your target and see if you can increase it comfortably.
A great practice is a sustainable one.
Book Recommendations for you:
Get rid of debilitating behaviors that will sabotage your writing practice:
Deep Work BUY FROM AMAZON.IN | AMAZON.COM
A book that will give you great tips on the right attitude and practices that will help in producing better outputs:
The Mental Game Of Writing BUY FROM AMAZON.IN | AMAZON.COM
A habit developed the right way goes a long way in achieving a lot more than you can imagine:
Atomic Habits BUY FROM AMAZON.IN | AMAZON.COM
Do you want to write every day and make it a sustainable practice? I’d love to hear what is working or not working for you!
You can reach me at sudha@sudhanair.com
You can find all my books here at BOOKS.
