How to Work up to Writing 1,000 Words a Day and More with Very Little Friction

And ultimately make money from writing.

Words. Writers love words. Writing isn’t hard. Writing well is hard. Learning how to sit down every day and face a blank screen and blinking cursor is hard. But once you have the habit of writing down, you have conquered half the battle.

Sitting down and writing is the hardest part. Once you master it, writing daily to get your reps in becomes a lot easier with each passing day.

Step One

Call yourself a writer.

If you write, you are a writer. Some will argue this point. I believe we are all writers. Some practice the craft of writing more than others. If you sit down at a blank screen every day and write one word, you are a writer. Once you get into the habit of writing, writing 1,000 words a day or even 7,000 words a day isn’t hard.

You have to build the muscle.

This post is already almost 200 words, and I’ve been writing for a few minutes.

Step Two

Come up with a system.

And then refine it to make it as efficient as possible for you. Each writer is different. Rituals that work for Stephen King wouldn’t work for me. You can’t refine your system until you have a system to refine.

Every creator has a system. Whether you sculpt, paint, write words, or code, you have a system. Your system can be found in how you answer the following:

How often you write
Where you write
What time of day you write
How often you submit to publications
What rituals you use to get you into the writing chair
Whether you take a class to get better at writing
What days you edit
How you break down an article to make it clear and concise for your readers
Do you outline first?
Where you keep headline ideas, drafts, thoughts to write about, etc.
Where you market your work
What two social media channels are your go to’s to create community and to network

The answers make up part of a developing system as you become a prolific writer and drive you towards creating content that gets read. For success, focus more on the system and not the goal. Yes, you need to know the goal.

I want to make money from writing. I want to run a blog that sells my courses. I want to write a book published by a traditional publishing house. I want to write a book that I sell on Amazon and self-publish. State it, write it down even, put it in large red letters over your desk in your office, but put most of your time and effort into developing a system that undergirds your writing habit.

Step Three

Come up with a solid plan to get your reps in.

Start with a realistic goal, so you don’t set yourself up for failure and give up.

I recently bought a Peloton bike. I could barely bike for 10 minutes when I went on my first ride. My cardio was shot. During the pandemic, I stopped going to the gym after going every day for years to get in my cardio workout on an ellliptical. I was excited to have this brand new beautiful bike to work out on, but I didn’t want to start with an hour workout and possibly hurt myself and get discouraged. That would only serve to push getting back into shape further out of reach. The first week I did ten minutes. The second week 20, then 30. Now I’m up to 45 minutes each day. At 45 minutes, my cardio health has drastically improved in one month, and 45 minutes on that torture machine doesn’t feel so bad. It’s miles easier than that first day.

The same method can be applied when building the writing muscle.

Here is a plan for getting into a writing habit. Remember, if you miss one day, don’t beat yourself up. We all miss days. We’re all human. Try, though, not to miss two days in a row. Each day you miss, you’re compounding the pain when you decide to start again. You’re extending future suffering by not writing today. Day two will be easier to start writing after missing one day than will day three after missing two days.

Week one — 200 words
Week two — 500 words
Week three — 800 words
Week Four — 1,000 words

If you’re more ambitious and you’re determined to follow through, do the same number of words but by day,

Day one — 200 words
Day two — 500 words
Day three — 800 words
Day four — 1,000 words

Increase from there but make 1,000 words a day the standard. Add on when you have consistently written 1,000 words a day for one month. To make forming the habit easier, make sure you specify an exact time and place to write.

This is called Implementation Intention.

I will write at 8:00 am in my office each day for one hour or I will write 500 words.

Whichever works for you and delivers the best results with the highest output. Experiment. Does setting a specific word count work better for you or setting a specific time frame?

While writing every day, do the following.

#1. Read and keep your eyes and ears open for interesting content to drill down on.

If you don’t like to read, you won’t like to write.

I read every night for a few hours and sporadically throughout the day. Good writers read a lot. They read for inspiration, to get their neurons firing, to challenge their thinking and ideas, and to practice Quantum thinking — the art of looking at things from all sides.

Prolific reading leads to better writing. Read at the level you want to write. You’ll get better at writing at that level.

Reading is an essential component to producing a lot of content. If you don’t like to read, you won’t like to write very much. An appreciation for language and words is essential to becoming a good writer.

#2. How to build an audience.

If you are a writer or an artist, get your work into the hands of people and in front of as many eyeballs as possible. There are many ways to do this. It is writing a book or content and figuring out how to get it into the hands of your audience that counts.

Traditional publishing — Gatekeepers like agents and publishers don’t always know what they’re doing. They turned down J.K. Rowlng a few hundred times. Just like anything else, hype is not determinative of quality.

There are so many other ways to get your words into the hands of people who will read them.

Self-publishing is not just for publishing e-books, although publishing an e-book is a great way to get your feet wet if you want to write a self-published book.
Make an Audiobook through Audible.
Publish on writers’ platforms that act similar to a WordPress blog, like this one, or Quora, the question and answer platform, News Break, your own blog built using WordPress or WIX.
On a t-shirt and make your family wear them all the time. James Altucher printed his book, “Choose Yourself!” on 20 t-shirts, all 67,000 words. He only lets his kids in the house if they’re wearing them.
Sell your book on the internet somehow.
Build an email list and sell it to your subscribers.
Create a print-on-demand book through Createspace.
Self-publish on Amazon.

#3. One way to create a habit is to start a blog.

When you have a blog or create a brand and share content on other platforms, it forces you to write every day. You could write 1,000 words broken up into fifty tweets.

Half the battle in being a successful content creator is practicing discipline and consistency. You can build an audience with a blog, as well as find friends and a community. This is where you create an audience for yourself, where you find true fans.

While writing every day, keep the following in mind.

#1. Writing is a muscle.

Do it every day. It doesn’t mean you have to share it. Just write.

Yesterday I wrote 2,000 words on how much I enjoy eating chocolate. Not to share, just to get my reps in.

When you don’t write every day, you lose the skill quickly and won’t realize your potential skill level. It takes daily practice. Exercise the muscle even if you give yourself a silly exercise to get the work in.

If you don’t know what to write about, go to Vocal Media and try one of their challenges. If you win the challenge, you earn prize money. You don’t even have to submit what you wrote, if you don’t want to. The point is to write.

It doesn’t matter if you write something that stinks or is amazing. You are just getting in your writing time, so the next day is easier.

After you develop the muscle, writing 1,000 words a day is easy. It sounds hard at first, but it isn’t.

I’ve been writing for 20 minutes and have written 700 words. And I’ve taken breaks. I’ve gotten up and down several times because my dog is being needy and just threw up. If you write just 1,000 words a day that are publishable, you have a book every two months.

If you don’t have a consistent writing habit established, or you keep starting and stopping, or maybe you’ve had a couple of consistent weeks and life comes up, and you stop, try starting with tiny wins. If you’re starting over again or from not writing at all, work up to 1,000 words a day.

I write well over 1,000 a day, a lot of it is lost in the rewriting process, which is equally as important.

Most new writers struggle more with the writing part and less with the editing and rewriting part. I’m the opposite. I don’t like editing, but I can sit down at the computer and bang out 2,000 words quickly.

#2. It is in the rewriting that good writing is born.

Think of it as sculpting. Michelangelo’s statue of David was carved from a block of marble. It was chiseled and refined until what was left is that beautiful piece of art we have today.

Editing is the exact same thing. You fine-tune, cut out words that don’t add to flow, or lag, sound awkward and replace them with words that make writing clear and more concise.

The more words you start with, the more you have to work with and cut. Don’t write and then edit. Write for a few hours, give your work a breather, go do something else and then edit. Edit with fresh eyes. Read your work aloud and cut out anything that lags. You’ll know instinctively which parts lag, those parts that bore you. Get rid of those.

Art is in the rewrite.

#3. Writing can be fun and doesn’t always require suffering.

Some of the best books were written in a short amount of time. “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac and Bukowski’s “Post Office” were both written in three weeks.

Granted, those writers had written a lot of words before they wrote those famous works of art. But it is possible to write something worthwhile in a short time.

Most authors have several, if not a dozen books to their names. We only hear about their successes. Overnight successes have years of solid work and effort behind them.

Write on.

How I Write and Publish a Blog Post a Day

And make 3K a month just from writing a few hours a day.

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