How I Keep Writing — Even When I Don’t Feel Like It

How to maintain forward momentum with your writing business

I used to write in word-vomit sprints. I’d write for 10–12 hours straight, feel completely burned-out, and take long breaks between sessions. This method worked for a bit, but the breaks between writing sessions became so long, my productive output suffered.

I needed a better way to maintain my writing momentum.

Instead of trying to force myself to write twelve hours a day, every day, I gave myself the challenge of a daily writing habit. At first the goal was to write a single word every day. I never write one word, but that was the goal.

I developed the daily writing habit. Since I don’t have to rely on word-vomit sprints to hit my writing goals, now I can write fewer words per day. Since I write daily, I still cover over a million words a year.

When I write every day I keep the stone rolling.

The more I pause between writing sessions the more I feel like an impostor. I fear all my insecurities, and I worry no one will want to read my writing. Now, I refuse to feed fear with time. The more time I give the fear, the bigger it gets. When there’s no time in between writing sessions, the fear doesn’t have time to grow.

Momentum helps the subconscious

Not only does daily writing momentum help your output and keep the fear at bay, but it also helps your creative mind do its best work. When we think in terms of a daily practice, we don’t have to over-think a writing session.

I know I’ll write tomorrow if I don’t finish what I write today.

With this freedom from writing sprints, I put myself in more opportunities for flow-state. When we’re in flow, we become a transcriptionist for the ideas generated by our subconscious mind.

The subconscious is the workhorse part of our brain. The conscious, working mind is wimpy in comparison. Our best ideas stem from the subconscious, but in order to access it, we’ve got to put ourselves in the right working conditions to get there.

Daily writing keeps the subconscious momentum moving too.

Your daily sessions show your brain that writing is a priority. These ideas stay in the forefront of you subconscious, because writing is something you focus on frequently. Hence, creative ideas create more creative ideas.

Forward momentum helps you finish

Finishing a writing project is just as important as starting one. When we keep the daily writing boulder rolling, the work becomes easier to finish. We work in smaller chunks. One chapter a day is much easier to maintain than eight chapters a day.

When I wrote in sprints I burned out and stopped writing altogether.

Once I build the daily writing habit, the momentum helped me finish much more content than I’d ever finish before. You can do this too. That old manuscript does your reader no good if you haven’t published the book. When we keep the writing momentum moving, finishing becomes faster and easier.

We need you to finish your work so we can read more of it.

We need you to write every day, because we want your best work.

We want you to keep your momentum going, because we benefit from your finished work.

We’re waiting for you.

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August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

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