Why It’s Easier to Write Daily Than Struggle to Write Weekly

Unless you’re a unicorn, writing whenever won’t cut it

Medium loves itself an active writer. But this story isn’t just about Medium. When you write daily it burns the behavior deep in your brain. When you write daily you get faster at bringing the idea to the page.

When you write daily it’s easier to keep writing, even when you have a bad day.

I’ve found the more boundaries I place on my writing, the easier it becomes. I know that sounds irrational — I mean, why would you want to put a fence around art. But fences make better stories.

Daily writing is a fence. We write whether we feel like it or not.

Now, none of this daily writing business is important if you’re not a commercial writer (you want to earn money from your craft). But if you’d like your writing to feed you some day, it’s easier to keep the daily pace than write when the mod strikes.

It’s the difference between being all-in and 98% of the way there.

100% writer is much easier to maintain.

There are no decisions to make. Today you write. Tomorrow you write — even if it’s 50 words. You make the decision to be a daily writer, and unless there’s a bus accident you get those fingers wiggling.

Plus, when you write daily you get the bonus of cumulative effort.

Write 500 words a day (which should take an hour or two — tops). At the end of the year, you’ve 2–3 books written.

The production ramps-up quick if you write even more.

Let’s look at 2,000 words a day. If you’ve written for awhile this won’t take too much of your time, especially if you add a little cell phone writing to your process.

If you can consistently write 2K/day you’ll end the year with 9–10 books.

That’s the power of game-changing, cumulative effort.

But you don’t start the process with a 9-book goal. You start the process by making an important decision. I am a daily writer. Once you decide that, you eliminate all the other guesswork that you’d encounter if you were a 98% writer.

It’s much harder to write most of the time than it is to write all the time.

Your brain loves consistency — thrives on the stuff. The more we repeat a daily routine, the stronger the myelin sheath covering the pathway. You literally hard-wire your melon to operate a certain way via repeated exposure to a certain behavior (in this case, writing), to the point where it will feel funny not to write daily.

Will you miss a few days?

Yep.

But, in aggregate, you’ll be a daily writer. No, you probably won’t pop-out 9 books this year, but you might write a couple million words worth of Medium stories instead.

That’s what I do.

1-2 million words a year.

I take my writing time seriously. I write really fast. And I use my phone a lot. You can get an extra 1,000 words a day, just by stealing small moments to write.

No, mobile writing is not for every writer, but it works for more people than think it will work.

Why does any of this matter?

Daily writing builds discipline. When you train yourself to build discipline in one area you can overcome another. Writing is an individual art. We write alone. We must self-motivate and it’s really easy to skip a day when we don’t feel like writing.

When you build daily discipline you increase the speed of your goals. The results (or opportunity for the results) come quicker.

We’ve got more material in the basket.

We become better writers faster, because we’ve got 100X more practice than the occasional writer. There’s a table called an ‘occasional table.’ These things are fragile and ornamental. That’s not the type of writer I want to be.

Will writing daily-alone, make you better? Nope.

If you repeat the same, bad writing behaviors you’ll only make them more-permanent. But, if you also self-reflect on your craft, and work to improve small details of your writing, you’ll get better — fast.

Try writing daily.

Give it at least 60 days before you give up.

You might be happy with the results.

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. As a self-appointed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indies how to make work that sells and how to sell more of that work once it’s created. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing, August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.