What You Learn by Writing Daily
Put it into practice
Skills are hard to master because they take time, patience, and dedication. No one gains any sort of skill by doing nothing, yet we expect some sort of instant result.
When I picked up the guitar at age 15, I practiced every single day. There wasn’t a day that went by when I wasn’t doing something on my instrument. I took lessons and back then, we only had magazines for music transcriptions. I bought every monthly magazine and poured over them like a ravenous dog.
I eventually started to sound half-decent because I did this thing called practicing. It’s what we have to do if you want to learn a skill. A lot of guitar players keep the guitar in the closet and say they can’t play. The reason why they can’t play is that there’s no practicing.
The same can be said with writing or any other skill. There’s certain things you’ll learn when you write every single day. here’s what will happen.
Habit
When you write each day you’ll establish a habit. Writing becomes something that you’ll do regardless of what happens during that day. It has to become as common as brushing your teeth.
If you’re not establishing a writing habit, then nothing will get accomplished and you can’t progress. I’d never have learned how to solo on guitar if I hadn’t picked it up each day and played. You can’t learn how to write if you don’t make writing a daily habit that happens like clockwork.
Discovery
When you write every day you’ll discover what you like to write about. Maybe you prefer novel writing to articles, or perhaps you fancy yourself as a screenwriter. If you’re not writing on a daily basis it’s hard to discover where your writing strengths are.
You should try different things and see where it leads you. Writing is all about discovering what’s inside of you and what you’re capable of.
Accountability
When you write every day you hold yourself to account. You know that to grow your skill you have to practice, so writing daily helps you to account so you have some sort of tangible results at the end of the day. You can look back on the rods you wrote and admire your accomplishments.
If you’re not holding yourself to account, then it’s hard to make any progress. Writing is not for tomorrow, it’s for today. Sit down and accomplish something with writing today as tomorrow is too late.
Organization
You’ll be better able to organize your thoughts if you write all the time because you’ll have the practice to make sense of what you’re putting on the page. You’ll know how to form proper paragraphs, create headings, and draw conclusions to your work because you’ve been doing it for so long.
If you don’t write all the time then your thoughts may be disjointed and not make much sense because you haven’t learned how to form them correctly on the page.
Research
Writing every day helps you learn how to research and discover things about topics you may not fully understand. A lot of the time you need to read and dive deep into a topic. By writing each day and putting this into practice, you’ll strengthen your skillset even more.
Free of Excuses
By writing every day you’ll be free of excuses. You won’t have to feel bad about yourself because you’ll have words on the page at the end of the day. We beat ourselves up about not writing, but this is warranted because nothing was accomplished. You can grow or discover who you are as a writer by not writing.
When you write each day, there’s no more excuses and you can feel proud of what you have achieved even if it's a few lines of a poem or a simple paragraph. You have still accomplished more than you would if you didn’t write a single word.
Banish Fear
A lot of the time we don’t write out of fear. Perhaps you’re afraid of what might appear on the page. As a writer, you have to free yourself of any fear you have and go for it.
If you don’t like what you have written, you can always start again and try something new. Once you get into the practice of writing then it becomes second nature and you’ll accomplish way more than you thought possible.
The trick is to sit down and do it. Sometimes it’s hard to start writing and there’s going to be struggles and huge roadblocks, but you’ll get over those if you make the commitment to write and learn as you go.
It’s the only way
