Tag Archive for: writing habit

The Write Life: Accepting Defeat

Much of the writing life is about acceptance. We have to accept rejections and passes on our work. We also get to accept publications and contracts! We have to accept our physical and skill limitations. We also have to accept admiration and gratitude. But the thing I unfortunately have to accept right now is that my writing life is not going as planned and therefore, it is time for accepting defeat.

This defeat isn’t about giving up, though. This defeat is about reorganizing my priorities and admitting that while I made a good decision in January to shift my goals, that decision is no longer working for me and it’s time to change the plan.

Accepting Defeat

Two roads diverging in front of a mountain that might symbolize a writer accepting defeat and taking a different path to their chosen goal.

Photo by pine watt on Unsplash

Back in January I was struggling to motivate myself to put time into my novel. My goal in 2023 had been to write at least 250 words a day. Because writing the novel was hard, I was avoiding it, and then slapping 250 words on to something in a rush at the end of the day. That’s not the kind of writing life I want to have, so I made a change. I changed my minimum 250-words-a-day goal into writing 10 minutes on my novel every day. It helped! Suddenly I didn’t feel as much pressure to write a lot on my novel, and I could put in a little time every day and make progress until I felt comfortable. It was a success! I won!

But as the year’s continued, my overall word count has diminished, and I’ve felt less worried about putting in those 10 minutes every day because I’m:

  • busy with other things
  • tired
  • hurting
  • distracted
  • not in the right mindset

I’ve been avoiding my novel AND have started putting words into things just to mark off that I wrote for the day (without any regard for quantity or project). Again, that’s not the writing life I want to have.

So now it’s time to shift. I’m going back to a daily word count. After a few months I may find my footing and decide to change course again, but the relief I feel just from writing this post tells me this is the right thing to do. I am accepting defeat and moving forward so my writing life can be the one I want to have.

 

 

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The Write Life: Writing Habits Take Time

Remember at the beginning of the year when I changed some of my daily goals to better align with my writing priorities? Yeah, that was a rough transition. I spent a lot of January ducking my head and saying, “what daily writing goals?” But I’m happy to report that in May, I wrote something on my novel every day. The moral of the story is: writing habits take time.

Two hands holding up an orange alarm clock while demonstrating that writing habits take time to build!

Photo by Malvestida on Unsplash

Lots of people expect that once they decide to do a thing—write a novel, write every day, write 1K words every time they sit down— they’ll be able to just do it. But making the plan is not the same thing as executing the plan. Building a regular writing habit (no matter what it is) can be a struggle and take time to develop. But you can make it easier if you keep a few things in mind.

Acknowledge the Struggle

The first thing you need to do is appreciate that building a writing habit can be hard. Even if it starts as a breeze, it’s easy to hit a wall once life gets more complicated, or you have a day in which you struggle to motivate or create. The habit part of a writing habit comes when you can work around most obstacles and still do the work you intend to do.

(Skipping a day on purpose is not a failure. Skipping a day on accident likely means you still have habit building to do. Which is respectable! Just keep at it.)

Reward Hard Work

Reward yourself when you follow through with your plan. Check it off on a to-do list, give yourself a sticker, tell a friend or social media—just reward yourself and celebrate every time you perform the task you planned.

You may think, “all I did was write 100 words on my novel, lots of writers do that.” Yes, but lots of writers DON’T. Lots of writers let other things stand in the way of their words, and you didn’t today. YOU wrote and did the writing you intended. That deserves more acknowledgement than you think.

Stay Flexible

You may find the habit you planned doesn’t fit your life and you need to make adjustments—or make adjustments for now and build the more time-consuming habit in a year when other responsibilities shift.

Stay flexible with yourself and be ready to change your plan with grace. Remember, the writing habit has to fit your life, not the other way around.

Writing Habits Take Time

Building writing habits take time, so give yourself the grace to build at your own pace. There’s no one timeline; there’s no expectation of results. There is you and the habit you want to build. You can make changes to your plan, give yourself days off, or do whatever else you need to make a writing habit that sticks. But trust that it takes time and it’s not all or nothing.

 

Habits, not heartbreak. That’s the main thing you should remember while you build writing habits. It’s going to take time, it’s sometimes going to be hard, but it shouldn’t break your heart. If it is: adjust! You’re doing this for yourself and while it might not be easy, it shouldn’t be painful.

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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The Write Life: Create Writing Motivation

Starting a new writing project can be overwhelming. Even when I’m excited, there’s so much ahead. There’s words, time, decisions, commitment—and when I think about how many words it takes to draft and revise a novel or how many things are still undecided or how many hours (and then days, weeks, and months) are between me and the end of my book, it can stall my momentum. So, it’s important for writers to have some idea of how to create writing motivation.

Lack of motivation isn’t the same thing as a lack of desire. I wanted to dive into my novel back in November, but I only managed to work on it for 15 days before the end of 2023. (Which for some of you probably sounds amazing, but as a daily writer, it’s much less so.) Some of those distractions were related to life—the holiday season, illness, commitments to friends and family—but some of it was from a lack of motivation. Luckily, writers can create writing motivation, it just requires some ingenuity, a toolkit, and knowing yourself really, really well.

Create Writing Motivation

Identify the Easiest Goal

Start by identifying the easiest goal that will also make you feel good about your progress. There are three rules to follow when identifying this easiest goal:

  • Choose something you can achieve every time you sit down to write.
  • Choose something that also gives you room to exceed your goal.
  • Choose something that will feel like progress.

For example, if you usually write 250–300 words when you sit down to write, your easiest goal might be to write 100 words on your novel every time you write. 100 words is less than you normally write, so you know it’s achievable, and since you normally write more, you have room to exceed your goal and feel great about your progress. And just imagine the day you write 500 words. That’s five times your usual goal! Now that’s a lot of progress.

Goals you might consider include:

  • word count
  • time spent writing
  • completing scenes or beats

Track Your Habit

Record each time you meet your writing session goal. You can use any kind of tracker you like but use something that will create writing motivation.

Physical or visual trackers can be good for seeing how small progress grows. You can mark days on a calendar, fill in blocks on a bullet journal, award yourself stickers, or use an app with a visual component (various graphs and chains are common in tracker apps).

It can also be helpful to have a tracker that automatically accumulates your progress. Like, a word count tracker where you fill in daily word counts, but the tracker informs you of how many total words you wrote and on how many days you worked. That data can help motivate you on future weeks and months to challenge yourself to reach a little further—or it can let you off the hook, so you know you’ve got padding for any rough days ahead.

Break Your Plan into Manageable Chunks

Stop looking at your novel as writing and polishing 100,000 words, or even as writing 30 chapters. Don’t think about working on your novel for three hours every day for eight months (or the end math on that being 720 hours).

Start with that big picture, and then break it into smaller and smaller chunks until you find the chunk that sits comfortably in your head and motivates you to write.

You might need to break your novel into:

  • which chapters you’ll write each quarter of the year
  • which chapters you’ll write each month
  • how many scenes you’ll write each month (or week)
  • how many words or hours you’ll write each week (or day)

How you divide your plan into chunks doesn’t have to match your easiest goal—and may help if it doesn’t! Keeping an eye on time for your easiest goal and word count for your plan can provide multiple ways to create writing motivation. If you don’t have twenty minutes to write today, but you can quickly slap together your planned landmark of 200 words, you’re more likely to write than assume it’s a wasted writing day.

The Key to Motivation

The real key to learning how to create writing motivation is to give yourself as many motivators as you can. Word count goals, time goals, scene or chapter or date goals can all help move you forward—as long as they speak to you.

You might rely on a few rewards or prizes along the way, too. Some days that negotiation for a hot chocolate if I write 500 words is the thing that gets me from 437 words to over 500.

Accountability buddies, social media check-ins, and other ways of reporting your progress to someone can also create writing motivation. Knowing yourself, knowing what motivates you, and adapting other people’s suggestions to what you know will help YOU create writing motivation is the difference between starting your project and finishing it.

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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The Write Life: Break the Chain

I made a difficult decision this month to break the chain. After struggling to find the time and energy to work on my novel in any kind of meaningful way, I took a hard look at my writing life. I assessed what my days were like, what my stress levels were like, and why I kept putting off writing. I looked at my motivations and distractions and my goals. My precious, precious goals.

I’ve been writing at least 250 words every day, and after five years I decided it was time to break the chain.

Evolution of a Goal

When I first set the goal of writing 250 words every day, it was a path to a specific end goal. I wanted to move from being a daily writer to someone who writes 1,000 words every day.

I got it in my head from reading the habits of prolific and successful authors that the only way to “Make It” was to write 1K–2K every day. Which I was not doing. (Which I currently have no hope of growing into either, but we’ll get to that.)

My first steps on this path had gone well. I transformed myself first into someone who wrote daily, and then into someone who wrote at least 100 words a day, and then into someone who wrote at least 250 words a day. And most days I wrote more than that!

The original plan was to continue to up that goal every year—or whenever the minimum word count seemed “too easy”—but then I had a reality check.

Reality Check: Getting Intentional

So, like, writing a minimum of 250 words every day is fine. I was able to write 250 words when I was distracted by DragonCon, sick with covid, depressed, throwing up from a food allergy, and in many other really sucky situations.

But many of those times when I was writing those 250 words under less-than-ideal circumstances, I was also not writing intentionally.

I had fallen into the trap of writing literally anything to not break the chain—and then amassing starts of projects I was never planning to continue (mostly because they were babbling for the sake of word count).

I made the decision to write from a project list or with a specific project series in mind (like Writer Resources posts). And things got better. For a year or two. But I still had a problem.

Break the Chain (When It Binds You)

Whenever time was short, my stress was high, my mental health was low, my exhaustion had a vice grip on my brain—I wanted to write the easy words and keep putting links in the chain of 250 words a day.

“Easy” writing for me often equates to nonfiction posts or presentations about writing. In the last year, while I’ve been suffering another round of severe depression and heightened anxiety, I have written way, way more blog posts than fiction.

I have a specific end goal in mind again—a different goal than trying to write 1,000 words a day (which I have also given up as crazy-pants-thinking I don’t need in my life)—that goal is to write a draft of a novel. While writing 250 words a day would help that goal, it’s too much pressure right now.

At the start of a project, while I’m hemming and hawing, questioning my decisions and direction, and just figuring it all out, I don’t need the added pressure of making sure I’m hitting a daily word count. And trying to hit that daily word count was preventing me from putting time into my novel because I knew those weren’t easy words, I wouldn’t hit my 250 goal, and stress! Not writing! Ahhh!

And that, my friends, is why it’s time to break the chain. I have moved away from the original goal, the revised goal is no longer serving me, and it’s time to find some new habits to help support the writer I am today.

(But, uh, still a daily writer… FOR NOW.)

 

 

For full access to The Write Life and more about what I’ve done to assist with my creative life, sign up on Patreon for $1 or more per month. You’ll also receive a personalized thank you in a future edition of The Write Life.

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The Write Life: Writing from a Dry Well

Woof. As far as months go, this one has been stressful.

I’d like to claim it was good stress, the kind that causes me to dig deep and get things done, but mostly it was the kind that drains my energy and leaves writing time as struggle time.

Boats on a dry river.

Photo by Chester Ho on Unsplash

Other responsibilities, lots of piling work, emotional decisions, health concerns, invitations to socialize, and an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion all left me with a case of creative burnout. I struggled to translate thoughts into words. I felt like I didn’t have the time to devote to complicated projects. I was easily distracted and found making narrative decisions a challenge. Some days I looked at the open document and just sighed heavily and felt a gigantic “no” welling in my chest.

Those are tough feelings to carry as a creative, especially one working on their seventh consecutive year of daily writing!

But I am still working on that streak, so I was able to write, despite drawing from a creative well that felt scraped clean.

  • One of my tried-and-true methods of writing when I’m feeling drained is to work on something easier. “Easier” for me often means blog and Patreon posts or other nonfiction writing. Sometimes it also means planning a novel, rather than drafting one. (Writing a synopsis that can meander and have terrible ideas is a lot easier than crafting scenes that have to connect.)

    Frequently if I can get 10 or 20 minutes of the easier project done, I’ll feel warmed up enough to tackle the more complicated project, or I’ll have hit a word count that makes me feel comfortable spending time on a project that involves thought more than words. (This is the trade-off for having yearly and monthly word count goals, by the way.)

  • Another method that frequently works is to grab a writing prompt and start something new. A writing prompt is a fresh start with no baggage. That level of freedom can be easier to interact with than a project I’ve been contemplating or working on for a long time. Sometimes those doors opening to an empty space feel more inviting than a half-decorated room, and it’s easier to put pen to page and draft some words to warm up for the day.

    I admit, when I first started using prompts this way, I struggled with feeling like I was wasting my time because not all of those starts turn into finished stories. It required a shift in my thinking to allow myself room for creative play and to accept that sometimes what I need is free range across a blank page with no expectations—including no expectations of producing finished work. (That said, I have turned at least one prompt into a finished story in the last year, and there are a few others I’m still thinking about, so that’s not a waste at all!)

  • Writing long-hand instead of working on my computer is another way of freeing myself. My computer is where so many of my responsibilities live, so sometimes it’s distracting to use as my main writing tool. (That’s also why I try to do tasks in specific locations—editing at my desk, writing in my bedroom, etc.) Switching my writing tool can unlock the part of my brain held captive by my exhaustion and other responsibilities. A notebook, or sometimes my iPad, can offer a different view on what writing looks like and provide the fresh water I need to refill my creative cup.

It’s been a struggle to write daily this month with everything else going on, but day by day I’ve been getting it done by using one of these tools when things got a little tough and I needed to rely on something more than my own stubbornness.

 

 

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The Write Life: Writing Without a Block

Writer’s block is the bane of writers. And even though some people claim it doesn’t exist, it is totally real. It shows up in the wake of poor mental health, exhaustion, overwhelm, doubt, and a hundred other things that can distract and deplete our creative energies and focus.

If you’ve ever stared at a page and didn’t know how to start…

If you’ve ever been unable to decide what a character should do next (or written six versions of what could come next and still aren’t happy)…

If you’ve ever flipped through prompt after prompt with nothing inspiring you…

If you’ve ever deleted everything you wrote immediately after a writing session…

…then you’ve experienced writer’s block.

There is no one, overarching solution to writer’s block. Each kind of writer’s block needs to be treated in a different way, and each writer will respond differently to the possible solutions.

These days, though, I’ve largely been writing without a block, so perhaps I’ve discovered a shield that prevents writer’s block from moving in and taking over. For me, it’s being a daily writer.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

This shield didn’t develop overnight, but in the last six years of writing daily, I’ve gained more confidence in my ability to consistently produce. Because I practice writing every day and constantly reconnect with my creativity (and force myself to connect with my creativity), I have confidence that I know how to use those skills at the drop of a hat and that I can use those skills. A lot of the creative doubt around the question can I? has been alleviated because of that daily habit. (Do I still have doubts about success? Absolutely! Boy howdy, do I.)

The daily practice also has given me more experience figuring out what inspires me and what to do with inspiration. When I’m feeling creatively dry, I have a larger, more specialized well from which to draw new energy and more strategies for combining and developing ideas into stories.

I still experience creative blocks—an inability to decide what comes next, feeling lackluster about creation, not knowing where to start—but because I’m forming a chain of days of writing, I’m more likely to try, even if I’m feeling very meh about the creative process as a whole. Also, because I write daily, I usually have multiple projects to consider, so I can spend time away from a blocked project and make progress on something else. Being able to switch tasks means the writer’s block never takes control, and I’m able to work through the problem while it’s small rather than scrambling when it’s overwhelming.

Exhaustion is the one thing being a daily writer can’t cure—and in some cases it can create exhaustion and creative burnout more easily. But I can still take a break by writing less to maintain my habit and let myself rest and refuel. Overall, daily writing has helped my creative process and production, and I experience writer’s block much less frequently than I did when I was writing sporadically.

Is writing daily right for you? It may not be, but if you look through the list of benefits, you may figure out how to develop a writer’s block shield for yourself and be as well-equipped as I am while honoring your own creative process.

 

 

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Writing on Days When You Feel Drained

If you feel drained of ideas and motivation, that could be a sign that you need to take a writing break and let yourself entirely off the hook. Spend the day reading a book, catching up on TV, or actually, you know, interacting with people. I find that having conversations with other writers and creators is often the best way to find inspiration again.

But let’s assume for a moment that you can’t take a break and you have to write no matter what (ahem, like when you’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo). What do you do on those days when you have to force yourself to write?

Maintaining a Streak

If you’re writing to maintain a streak and it doesn’t matter what you write, so long as you write, it may be a day to shelve the current work in progress and try something new.

Shift over to your ideas notebook, grab a random prompt from the internet (there are a jillion, so if you don’t have a favorite site bookmarked, Google “creative writing prompts” or “writing prompt generator”), or ask your friends if there’s a story they’d like to be told. I’ve written some fun one-offs about my original characters inspired by things my friends prompted me or scenes they wish they’d read.

If you’re still struggling to get any words on the page, or are generally finding yourself uninspired, it’s time for some free writing. This free writing could eventually evolve into a blog post or story, but it might just be an activity to get you writing again.

Start with a question about what’s bugging you. This could be anything from, “Why am I so tired today?” to “How am I so uninspired?” Once you have that question nailed down, twist it into a question you can analyze and/or give advice about. “Why am I so tired today?” might become “How can you write when you’re tired?” or “What’s the greatest obstacle between a writer and a nap?” or “Why is sleep so important to the creative process?” Once you have a question, and one that is built on a topic that’s currently bugging you, you have something to write about. And turning it into a question that you can either analyze or give advice about lets you turn free writing about your problems into a positive exercise. Too often free writing about problems can turn into negative thoughts and self-immolation, but turning it into a question to be answered lets you think about the same topic in a completely different way and hopefully can inspire you to help yourself!

Writing to a Deadline

If you’re writing for a deadline and you must work on a specific piece, the real problem is that you have to find inspiration in a specific work, so jumping to other pieces isn’t always an option.

But it’s still where I would start.

When feeling totally uninspired on one story, I start by writing on something else. If you have another project in progress, spending some time on that might reinvigorate your motivation for the deadline project. If no other project is available, you can take any of the suggestions above and apply them here—prompts, free writing with a question, etc.

No matter what you’re writing, set a timer to limit how much time you spend working on other activities or projects. I recommend 10–15 minutes for warm-up writing before trying to get back to the project you’re supposed to be working on.

Or, instead of writing something different, you can use prompts that allow you to work with the same characters or the same world, essentially approaching your deadline project from the side instead of head-on. Try posing what-if situations for your characters, alternate scenes/endings, or writing something from the perspective of someone else in your world.

You can use a similar strategy as the suggested free writing activity by answering a question related to the thing you’re stuck on—”How can my character get out of this situation?” or “Who should my character partner with for this mission?” or “How does the world’s society/laws limit my character?” Using the free writing format as an opportunity to organize your thoughts can help you work through the problem in a different way than just thinking about it. (This is why so often solutions might come when we’re talking to someone else, rather than when we’re just thinking to ourselves. Different ways of communication allow us to organize our thoughts differently, so if you don’t have a friend on hand, have a conversation with a blank page!)

If you absolutely must be working on your deadline-driven project and don’t have time for warm-up activities, try reading the last 1-2 pages you’ve written and allow yourself to revise and edit them. One of the best ways for me to get back into a story is by working to flesh out the last thing I wrote. If the last thing I wrote is literally what stumped me—and I had difficulty figuring out where the story goes next—I rewrite from where the story started to derail. Sometimes I might keep all the action and description, but change the dialogue. Sometimes I might move the setting. Sometimes I might scrap the entire idea, or even shift who is in the scene and take the whole thing in a completely different direction! It may not feel like you’re getting anywhere (especially if you end up trashing that version and starting again), but what you’re doing is eliminating the ideas that aren’t working and helping find the idea that does work.

 

No matter what’s going on with you creatively, there are ways to dig deep on those days when you’re feeling drained. And the more often you practice digging deep, the easier it can get. I still sometimes hit days when I’m totally worn out and need a break, and on those days I write my minimum word count using one of the strategies above and call it a day. But because I’ve put in so much effort, it’s easy for me to use one of those strategies and see success. So even if it’s hard now, know that putting in the hard work will help train you as a writer and eventually you’ll be able to sail past those inspiration-less days with no trouble.

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