Four Steps to Develop a Writing Habit
And publish once a day.
Nine months ago, I didn’t have a writing habit. Unless tweeting constitutes as writing, it is writing, but it’s more accurately, complaining in 280 characters or less while acting as a distraction from more meaningful work.
I wanted more from my writing, so I stepped back from my 73 tweets a day and gave Medium a shot. I’ve found more satisfaction and meaning from writing long-form essays, improving as a writer, and staying off Twitter as much as I can.
The writing I’m talking about is writing for an hour or two uninterrupted.
I signed up for Medium in its infancy, but only as a reader. Less than a year ago, I put all my attention into Medium and have seen results more quickly than expected.
After nine months, I’ve developed a habit. I call myself a writer.
On a rare day I don’t write, I feel unsettled, like the feeling you have when you go to bed without brushing your teeth.
Here is what I did that turned into a writing habit
Step One: Have a plan
In retrospect, I did something that was kind of smart, by accident, and without knowing it would help me hit publish.
I signed up for a writing class.
I enrolled in Joshua Fields Millburn’s online class How to Write Better in conjunction with picking a date to start publishing on Medium every day. Joshua Millburn is of minimalist.com fame and has several bestsellers including, Everything That Remains.
June 26, 2019, was the date I chose to hit publish on Medium. This was about two weeks into the four-week class.
My goal: to post once a day for 30 days straight.
Because I was in class learning about writing, thinking about writing, reading books about writing, and completing homework writing assignments, I had plenty of ideas and content to share. My confidence in my writing increased after two weeks into a writing class.
Writing is a skill. A skill can be learned, as with any skill, the more practice you get, the better you become.
Work the muscle, and the next time you go to work out, the workout gets easier each time, it is the same for writing.
For the most part, I haven’t missed many days of publishing and even fewer days of writing.
Once I accomplished the 30-day mark, I kept going.
Step Two: You have to keep growing as a writer
You have to keep getting better. My writing sometimes stalls, I don’t mean I stop writing, no, the habit of daily writing is firmly established, I mean I don’t stretch and grow. I don’t take chances. I stay static and don’t get better. This usually happens when I stop reading other people’s work and write only in the three topics I typically write about; relationships, writing, and productivity.
A regular reading habit is an easy way to hone your craft. Read diverse material, don’t just stick to blog posts and online content, pick up a challenging book.
Read like a writer, take notes. Highlight sentences and whole paragraphs that speak to you, notice sentence structure, word choice, and flow.
Joshua Millburn writes out complete pages from his favorite authors to get acquainted with certain styles he admires. Imitation is not the same as plagiarism. Don’t steal someone else’s work. Ever.
But it will make you a better writer to dissect the work of authors you admire. When I do this, I write better.
You have to dig deeper and reach when you are a writer to get to the next level. To do this, take a class, or join a writer’s group of peers to review your work and gain valuable, constructive criticism from other writers.
One way I’ve gotten better at writing is by using Grammarly pro. I occasionally pay an editor to edit my writing. If you pay an editor, it cuts into your Medium profits a bit; however, it is a great way to develop better writing skills by paying attention to your editor’s notes.
If you don’t have money for an editor, Grammarly is the second best.
Step Three: Figure out in what conditions you write best
So, if you want to write, try this: go into a room alone and think. Start to write your thoughts on your laptop or on a piece of paper. You will have something to say, and tomorrow you will have something more to say about it.
The important thing is coming back again and again, at the same time, to create a habit.
How I set up my environment determines how successful I am as a writer, and whether I activate the muscle every day.
Here is my writing environment
- Write at the same time every day, always before noon
- No one is in the room with me
- My phone is in another place or turned off
- I have water next to me, maybe a latte, and nothing else
- I don’t check email, Facebook, Instagram, or texts
- I turn off notifications on my computer
- I shut down all browsers except for the one I’m researching on if a story requires research
- I don’t get up for two or three hours except to stretch every 50 minutes
- I wear TIJN blue light blocking glasses to keep my eyes healthy because of how much I look at the screen
- Before shelter-in-place, I often wrote at a coffee shop, the same coffee shop, and usually in the same seat in the coffee shop at the same time of day.
- I edit my work later in the afternoon, or the next day to get some distance from it.
I’ve maintained this same environment and schedule for nine months, and a habit formed through tiny, daily choices. I experimented with small tweaks every week to see what increased my writing output, and consistency won again and again.
Step Four: You have to enjoy it
This is the one lesson I learned that surprised me, you have to enjoy it.
You can begrudgingly write, but you’ll most likely end up stopping if you do it begrudgingly. You can’t resent a goal you are trying to accomplish, that attitude won’t propel you forward.
It’s like cooking when you’re angry, the person eating the meal you prepared won’t taste any love because it wasn’t there while you were creating.
Developing a writing habit and becoming a better writer takes effort, time and persistence. You won’t continue to exercise your writing muscle is you hate the act of doing it. Writing isn’t always easy, you won’t always want to sit in the chair and write, but you have to decide to.
Change your frame of mind.
Brenda Ueland writes in her book If You Want to Write,
I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten — happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.
Doesn’t that sentence make you want to go sit in a chair in a quiet room and write?
Write on.
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering type-A personality. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.